Blogs

Twenty years of touring and recording, of inspiration and graft for moderate acclaim, and it comes down to this. Mark Kozelek, the pivot of first Red House Painters and now Sun Kil Moon, is engaged in one more slog around Europe. It is not going well.

Today, as you may have heard, is apparently the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first gig.

With the death of Ernest Borgnine, aged 95, it feels like yet another precious link back to a golden era of Hollywood film making has gone.

There’s a batch number of high-profile music documentaries out this year – Kevin Macdonald’s Marley and Joe Berliner’s Paul Simon films have already arrived, with the Rolling Stones, the Stone Roses and Fillmore East projects yet to come. But truffle a little deeper and you’ll find some less well-known but equally rich stories deserving attention.

When Bob Dylan played Hop Farm in 2010, it was the hottest weekend of the year and there seemed to be more people at the festival than the site could hold. There were queues for everything and queues to join those queues were not uncommon. By early afternoon, you could barely move for the people already there and the constant stream of new arrivals who added to an already considerable mass.

Do opera-goers have low boredom thresholds? It certainly seems that way watching the production of Damon Albarn’s “Dr Dee” at the English National Opera – or at least that director Rufus Norris assumes they do.

Hi there, I hope those of you who braved the abysmal weather last weekend to go to the Isle of Wight festival had a good time and made it back unscathed.

Speaking to Uncut around the release of The Proposition, Nick Cave conceded, “The whole thing was a struggle. So much effort was put into it. It’s the most agonising, frustrating business to be in. Years go by trying to get something off the ground – one idea! It’s unbelievable, the vision you have at the beginning is constantly chipped away at, and you haven’t even filmed anything.”

One of the records I’ve been playing the absolute hell out of these last couple of weeks is The Graceless Age, the new album by John Murry, who Uncut regulars may remember from World Without End, a sensationally bleak 2006 collection of contemporary murder ballads he made with the Memphis singer-songwriter Bob Frank. The Graceless Age, like World Without End, produced by Tim Mooney, the former American Music Club drummer, at Closer Recording, the studio Tim owned in San Francisco, at 1441 Howard Street. The more I played it, the more The Graceless Age sounded like one of the best things Mooney had been involved in, as either producer or musician, a dark and festering masterpiece.

Tom Petty is a man of many guitars, most of which seem to make an appearance on stage at some point in tonight’s proceedings. Here’s a red Fender, a blonde Rickenbacker, a white Gibson, back to the Fender, and on. It seems fitting, I suppose: Petty’s first show in the UK for 13 years is very much about craft and musicianship.