Features

As I get older, I find it harder and harder to do these charts - maybe because there are so many records I like, it seems churlish to organise them so crudely. Nevertheless, it's fun having a go - as, hopefully, you're discovering with our Best Of 2007 supplement with the new issue, and the Rate the albums of the year thing on www.uncut.co.uk. I'll try and post my favourite reissues and comps later, but please let me know your picks, too.

Some good stuff in the post today, notably the first four Michael Rother solo albums which, in an act of gross self-indulgence, I played back-to-back. And also the new Elbow album: track six, which I think is called "Weather To Fly", is one of those songs that's so fine and delicate it made me stop work and gaze poetically out of the window for its duration.

A few weeks, maybe months ago, someone left a note after one of my blogs with some insider knowledge about the next Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds LP. It was, they suggested, the most direct pop album that Cave had ever made: after the Stoogesy ramalams of Grinderman and the meditative western soundtracks, here, apparently, was the workaholic Cave at his most focused and dynamic.

A couple of things that have been hanging around for a few weeks now, and deserve some love here. One is “Rosemarie”, the debut album by an authentically fragrant Cornish band of Pre-Raphaelite damsels and dazed troubadours called Thistletown. Give me any excuse, and I’ll go into a comically apoplectic rant about the uselessness of most contemporary British bands who style themselves as acid-folk.

In spite of my morbid suspicions about any record which features Har Mar Superstar, I find myself quite taken with the first album by Neon Neon. It's called "Stainless Style", and maybe it's acting as a kind of antidote to all the manly Led Zeppelin love I've indulged in these past few days.

An office playlist today, since I've been putting the finishing touches to the next issue of Uncut and writing another - more coherent, hopefully - review of Led Zeppelin for the mag. John Robinson, our Reviews Ed, has mainly been at the controls this afternoon, running through a few new releases and currently dusting down The Beastie Boys' "Check Your Head", which is fine by me. Neon Neon, incidentally, is yet another new album from Gruff Rhys, this time a synthpop/hip hop/R&B concept album about John DeLorean, in collaboration with Boom Bip, a kind of substitute Danger Mouse. Sounds pretty good, anyway.

It occurred to me, as I stumbled somewhat exhausted out of last night's screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's epic movie about oil, greed and murder, that both this film and The Assassination Of Jesse James seem to be a return to the kind of filmmaking not seen since Heaven's Gate.

While John and Farah were riffing it up at Led Zeppelin last night, I went to see Ridley Scott's latest and, presumably, Final Cut of Blade Runner, one of my favourite films. For a cold and drizzly Monday night viewing at the Screen On The Green in Islington, it was remarkably busy -- unsurprisingly, the audience conspicuously all male, pretty much all of them, like me, glued to the screen.

So, now you know what happened at the O2 tonight courtesy of our earlier blogs - but what did the fans think of Led Zeppelin's historic return? Here are the views of a selection of people we accosted on their way out of the mighty dome...oh, and here's the opinion of a bona fide rock star to start you off too.

So I’ve just got home from the Dome and the Led Zeppelin gig, so hopefully you’ll forgive me for the fact that my thoughts aren’t quite as neatly organised as usual. First off, I have to point out that, at the risk of sounding smug, they were fucking great.