Features

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.

BBC4’s fine night of Southern Rock programming was still on my mind yesterday morning when I arrived back at Uncut, and a bit of chat about the shows at my Twitter feed eventually lead to a crowdsourced Southern Rock Playlist.

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

Graham Coxon’s new album A+E is reviewed in the latest Uncut (May 2012, Take 180), out now – so we thought we’d revisit the last time the guitarist featured in our pages. In 2009, John Robinson met the guitarist at his Camden home to find out about his folk-infused solo album The Spinning Top, and hear all about the little matter of his old band’s reunion… Picture: Essy Syad

Dodgy list last week, really good one this. A few things to flag up, not least the Jimmy Page “Lucifer Rising” soundtrack which has been distracting us from finishing the issue this morning.

“I feel like a stand-up comic who’s not getting any laughs,” says Patti Smith self-deprecatingly, as she presents a playback of her new album, Banga, to a specially invited audience in London. This is the first time anyone has listened to the record, she tells us – not even the band or Patti's record company have yet had the privilege of hearing it. The venue for this auspicious event is the old Scotch Of St James club in Mayfair, the principal hang out for Swinging London’s finest.

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.

As this month’s new Uncut (May 2012, Take 180) features Brian Fallon talking about The Gaslight Anthem’s upcoming new album, Handwritten, we thought it would be fitting to dig out this Uncut feature from January 2010 – in which Fallon tells Jaan Uhelszki how he became a rumbustious, show-stealing international phenomenon, beloved even by The Boss himself. Not bad for a tattooed punk kid whose “mother fed me Born To Run with my Cheerios”…

After last week’s notable arrival of Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Americana”, Playlist 14 is somewhat sketchier. Harder than usual for me to get behind a fair bit of this list, as a consequence – though as you can see, there’s still at least one very interesting new entry…