The shouts begin in earnest around the first encore – most of them are calls for specific songs, accompanied by a smattering of “We love you”s, but the one that raises the biggest cheer is simply: “Where have you been?”
“I find it faintly ridiculous that anyone would want to make a film about me,” says Luke Haines at the start of Niall McCann’s documentary, currently touring film festivals. Haines has spent much of his career as both a musician and, latterly, an author, raging splenetically and repeatedly against Britpop and those musicians he considers of lesser creative stature – which is most of them.
While I’ve been rather excitedly banging on this year about the return to active filmmaking of the class of 1990something – Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Whit Stillman, Todd Solondz – I should, in all fairness, spend a few moments on the new film by Rian Johnson, a veteran of the class of 2000something.
KISS have revealed full details of their new studio album 'Monster'.
The album, which is the 20th LP of the metal veterans' career, will be released on October 15 in the UK and October 16 in the US. You can see the album's artwork at the top of the screen.
Monster contains a total of 13 tracks, including recent single "Hell Or Hallejulah", which serves as the album's opening track and which you can hear by scrolling down to the bottom of the page.
One encouraging thread in movies this year has been the return of filmmakers of a Nineties vintage. Wes Anderson, Whit Stillman and Todd Solondz have all returned, successfully, from their various sabbaticals.
Potentially topping them all, we now have sight of the imminent return of Paul Thomas Anderson, with his first film since 2007's There Will Be Blood, called The Master.
Coming into work on the bus this morning, it occurred to me that the Christopher Nolan film I most wanted to watch again was Insomnia. I remember it being the least tricksy of Nolan’s films; a sharp, intelligent thriller, heavy on style and atmosphere, which seemed less concerned with the kind of ingenious puzzles and narrative twists that the director deployed in Memento, The Prestige and Inception.
Last night [July 16], the BBC pulled a documentary about last summer’s riots just hours before transmission after a court ruling prevented it from being broadcast. It’s foolish, of course, to speculate who initiated proceedings and for what purpose - although at the risk of sounding paranoid, you suspect there’s plenty of people who’d rather not have such pesky reminders of the riots on our screens in the run up to the Olympics.
