Michael Bonner

One of the things I wrote about in the new issue of Uncut is a review of the latest vinyl reissues from what was the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. For a panel to accompany the review, I had the good fortune to speak to composer Paddy Kingsland, one of the legendary studio boffins currently touring in the live iteration of the Workshop.

Revisiting some great YouTube footage of Bob in action...

Like everything else, Noel Gallagher had an opinion about debut albums. “Definitely Maybe was the young, eager, wanting to get out there and fucking blow the world away album,” he told Uncut in 2000. As Gallagher claimed on many occasions, he’d been strategising a debut album, in whatever form, since his teenage years. With such apparent forethought, it’s no wonder that when Definitely Maybe appeared in August, 1994 it redrew the parameters of indie rock, filling a void left by The Stone Roses and gave Alan McGee’s Creation Records a world-class act.

What the director of Easy Rider did next

Dylan? Sinatra? Fly me to the moon!

It's been a busy few days for fans of Wes Anderson.

Damon Albarn is a man of many guises, and it seems he also has an outfit to match them all. In his role as Blur frontman, he consistently favoured Fred Perry tops and oxblood Doc Martens. As a member of Gorillaz, he even went as far as to adopt an entirely different persona – the spiky-haired animated singer 2D (real name: Stuart Tusspot). For The Good, The Bad And The Queen, he favoured a Two Tone-style dark suit and a low top hat, and for his reimagining of the life of Elizabethan mystic John Dee, he went as far as to grow a beard. Tonight, he arrives on stage wearing a simple suit and tie and a pair of desert boots.

There is something to be said for the shoe-string budget movie. Recent films like Locke (Tom Hardy having a meltdown while travelling in a car from Birmingham to London) proved to be a refreshing and inventive corrective to the seasonal trudge of blockbusters. Blue Ruin is a similarly impressive low-budget affair, showcasing two emergent talents: writer/director Jeremy Saulnier and lead actor Macon Blair.

In the opening voiceover for their debut, Blood Simple, the Coen brothers established the methodology that has driven their films ever since: “I don’t care if you’re the pope of Rome, president of the United States, man of the year, something can always go wrong.”

Four years on from the death of his creator Chris Sievey, Frank Sidebottom has finally found the international platform that eluded him during Sievey's lifetime.