Features

As Bob Dylan, garbed in another of the natty Pimp-My-Confederate-General ensembles that have served as his working clothes these past few years, steps onto the stage of the Playhouse on Sunday into a jolting “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”, there is the small matter of him having just this afternoon officially clocked up his first Number One album in the UK for almost 40 years with Together Through Life.

Apologies for the long interruption to the service, but I’m back at Uncut this morning, slowly working my way through a mountain of new releases, beginning with the new Wilco album, “Wilco (The Album)”. Quite a nice way to start again, I guess.

In an era where science fiction movies are, perhaps aptly, about pushing forward the boundaries of digital technology, it’s refreshing to find a movie like Moon, which seemingly makes a virtue of its analog approach to film making. This is, I think, the first film to rely almost completely on model work, as opposed to CGI, since Blade Runner in 1982. In fact, on almost every level, Moon is retrofitted sci-fi, most conspicuously indebted to movies like Silent Running, Solaris, 2001 and Alien. It’s almost as if Star Wars never happened.

Not strictly an office playlist this week, since I haven’t actually been near the Uncut office for the past week and a half. Instead, here’s what I’ve been listening to at home, out and about in the sun, and so on.

The last time I was on a boat on the Thames, The Sex Pistols were playing “Pretty Vacant” as we sailed downriver past the Houses Of Parliament. It was Jubilee Day, 1977, and the cruiser we were on had just been surrounded by police launches, their searchlights raking the upper deck of our craft, dozens of their baton-wielding colleagues lined up in sinister ranks on Westminster Pier, waiting for us to dock so they could storm aboard and crack heads, which they eventually did with painful abandon.

29 Great moments from the 10th Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, Empire Polo Club, Indio, California, April 17-19, 2009. 1. Fleet Foxes drawing a huge, mellow crowd, sweltering under woolly beanies on the Outdoor Stage, Saturday, playing ‘White Winter Hymnal’. Temperature: 98 degrees. 2. Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Coachella Stage Sunday, dressed as a disco ball, doing The Cramps’ ‘Human Fly’.

29 Great moments from the 10th Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, Empire Polo Club, Indio, California, April 17-19, 2009. 1. Fleet Foxes drawing a huge, mellow crowd, sweltering under woolly beanies on the Outdoor Stage, Saturday, playing ‘White Winter Hymnal’. Temperature: 98 degrees. 2. Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Coachella Stage Sunday, dressed as a disco ball, doing The Cramps’ ‘Human Fly’.

I first went to the Cannes Film Festival seven years ago; coincidentally, I’d just finished reading JG Ballard’s novel, Super-Cannes, about murder in an ultra-modern business park tucked away in the hills above town. On a morning unencumbered by meetings, film screenings or a hangover, I took a cab from my hotel in Grasse up to Sophia-Antipolis, one of Ballard’s models for the novel’s Eden-Olympia technopole.

“I’m pretty nervous tonight,” Nancy Wallace confesses to a packed Borderline. “I can see the whites of your eyes,” she tells the people in front of her, all of them staring in her direction, rapt as ecstatics, transported, hanging on her every word.

Some pretty big names in the mix this week, including a small rush of survivors from the American ‘80s underground: shame the Lemonheads’ covers album hasn’t arrived in time to complete the set.