Blogs

Last year, I spent a fair amount of time listening to a mighty blown-out Philadelphia band called Purling Hiss, whose mainman Mike Pollize was sprung from another excellent local band called the Birds Of Maya.

If you can't quite make it out, that’s Chuck Berry’s signature, top left in the picture above of a couple of pages from the April issue of Uncut. It was sent to me by Uncut reader Scott Ford, who lives in St Louis, Missouri, home of course to the immortal Chuck, and was accompanied by a great email that I’ve copied below.

On March 20, the spring equinox, Jimmy Page finally made available his soundtrack to “Lucifer Rising”, at least to order, on vinyl.

Dylan at the Hop Farm Festival, Springsteen and Paul Simon in Hyde Park, the Great Escape Festival in Brighton, as mentioned last week, a ton of great bands at the No Direction Home and End Of The Road festivals, which have line-ups straight out of the pages of Uncut. There’s certainly no shortage of great gigs on the horizon, looming and inviting. There’s one among them, though, that I may actually be looking forward to more than anything else coming up: Dave Alvin at the London Jazz Café on April 20.

I had lunch with Harvey Weinstein once. This was during the Cannes Film Festival, and I was among a group of film journalists invited to one of the swelegant hotels on the Croisette to nibble canapés and listen dutifully while Weinstein unveiled the forthcoming slate for his company, Miramax.

This year’s Great Escape Festival in Brighton is almost upon us, running from May 10-12 at a 30 venues across the town and featuring somewhere in the region of 300 new artists.

The reggae singer, given the rock doc treatment...

Alex Chilton’s wild, idiosyncratic life after Big Star is examined in the new issue of Uncut (Take 180, May 2012), out now. But what happened before the demise of Chilton’s greatest group? They should have been rock superstars, but Rob Jovanovic explains how drugs, in-fighting and personal tragedy meant Big Star had to settle for being the biggest cult band of all time (from Uncut's Take 94, March 2005). ________________________________

The more-than-extensive ‘Immersion’ edition of Pink Floyd’s opus The Wall (the box includes a scarf and marbles!) is reviewed in our latest issue, out now – so we thought we’d revisit John Lewis’ excellent feature from June 2011 (Take 169). As the extravaganza arrives in Europe, Uncut meets the obsessive fans, stoners, bloggers and military advisors who’ll follow Waters and his lavish production to the ends of the globe…

Three weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be in New York interviewing Jack White for what will be Uncut’s next cover story. The trip took in White’s unveiling of his two new bands on Saturday Night Live (you can watch the performances here) and a couple of pretty intense one-on-ones, the first of which became a fairly epic grapple of sorts.