Features

Did you see that terrific BBC4 Squeeze documentary, Take Me I’m Yours, on Friday night? I was more than a little taken aback by the currently be-whiskered Glenn Tilbrook, but I’m sure there’s a plausible explanation for wanting to look like that and otherwise the programme was a timely reminder of the many great songs he and Chris Difford have written over the years. It also put me in mind of an eventful few days I spent with the band in 1980, when they were rather unhappily touring Australia, where I caught up with them in inhospitable Brisbane before we headed for the sunny beaches of Surfer’s Paradise. Here’s a piece I wrote for my old Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before column in Uncut.

James Bond at 50 seems in pretty good shape.

Roscoe Beck and others remember touring with the singer-songwriter

Tim Burton's kid friendly Frankenstein opens this year's London Film Festival...

Pretty busy trying to finish an issue here, but as usual, Neil Young is providing a distraction. Today there’s an opportunity to see why we’ve been making such a fuss about “Psychedelic Pill”: a video for the 16-odd minute “Ramada Inn”…

It was National Poetry Day last week, a date I’m sure you found your own ways to celebrate. I was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where John Cooper Clarke was in residence for the evening, headlining a show that also featured appearances by fellow poets Mike Garry and Luke Wright, a couple of sharp young wordsmiths who by the look of them may not have been capable of joined-up writing when Clarke was in his glorious early pomp and may possibly not even have been born then, Wright especially looking like he’s only just stopped being looked after by baby-sitters and cooed over in a crib.

Stoker arrives with some heavy expectations. It is the English language debut of South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, the architect of the nerve-shredding Oldboy.

Neil Young is not, at a guess, an artist who suffers much from writer’s block. In the past few years, many of his albums have felt like spontaneous dispatches from an over-productive mind.

John Lydon: "It was done more or less instantly"

I’ve not always had much time for the cult of Brian Eno, and for a lot of the music he’s been involved with in the last 20 or 30 years (I used this piece about Blues Control & Laraaji’s wonderful record to take a few swipes).