I don’t have any tattoos, for many reasons, but one of the best I can think of is that I don’t trust my aesthetic tastes to remain constant. I don’t feel confident that the art I like now will all, necessarily, be the same things that I like a few years down the line.

Read More >>

Quentin Tarantino came to a crossroads in his career when he made Jackie Brown in 1997. Coming after the lary carnage of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, his third film, adapted from Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, was an unexpectedly poignant and subtle account of middle-aged people doing whatever they have to do to survive. The guns, double-crosses and gangsters were there, of course - but there were other things, too: warmth, character and nuance.

Read More >>

If you’re feeling withdrawal symptoms after the glut of end-of-year charts last month, I cooked this up for the latest edition of Uncut…

Read More >>

At the end of November 2012, Low released a short video trailer for their forthcoming tenth full album, “The Invisible Way”. There is some static, and Mimi Parker talking about some “exceptional peaches”, then a cascading piano line fades in. After 44 seconds, and before the clip has revealed much of a shape as a song, the clip ends.

Read More >>

“The one thing that saved Mick at this point was Dylan,” Mick Ronson’s wife, Suzi, recalls in a terrific feature on her late husband by Garry Mulholland in the new issue of Uncut. She was talking about the shambles Mick’s career had become after he was dumped by David Bowie and his first two solo albums, Slaughter On 10th Avenue and Play Don’t Worry, had both flopped. Things hadn’t really worked out with the Hunter-Ronson Band, either, and you wondered where Mick might go from here when he unexpectedly hove into view as a member of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.

Read More >>

Until I woke up this morning and checked Twitter, I had planned to write something about the new Low album today. The enormously unexpected return of Bowiemania put paid to that; I’ll try again with Low tomorrow, unless in the intervening 24 hours Kevin Shields is finally shamed into pulling his finger out.

Read More >>

Could be wrong about this, but I think the track I posted and tweeted most often last year was “Sunshine, No Shoes” by the Philadelphia band, Spacin’: I’m going to add it again after the jump. Spacin’, to recap - though you can follow this link to a blog about them - are a project fronted by Jason Killinger, a spin-off from a longish-established Philly psych band called Birds Of Maya; BOM’s amazing “Ready To Howl” album got a belated UK release last year on Agitated.

Read More >>

Catching a relatively straightfoward performance from Crispin Glover in Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland over the festive season reminded me to dust down this interview I did with the actor for Uncut back in 2005.

Read More >>

Happy new year, everybody. Bit of a tentative start to 2013, though the new issue with Gram Parsons on the cover has just arrived in UK shops. A plug, too, for the next Uncut Ultimate Music Guide, dedicated to The Beatles, which I think is out January 17.

Read More >>

There’s a lot to be said for the charisma of premature death. And the manner of his particular dying – turning blue on a motel floor at the age of 26, his heart fatally faltering, ice cubes being stuffed up his ass in a pathetic attempt to bring him back from the brink after one binge too many – booked Gram parsons an automatic place of honour in a rock’n’roll Valhalla already overcrowded with dead young heroes, Jimi, Janis, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and more already among its spectral population when Gram died in September, 1973.

Read More >>