Blogs

God knows we’ve probably written enough about “Tempest” by now (not least these two terrific pieces by my colleagues Allan Jones and John Robinson). Nevertheless, part of Bob Dylan’s enduring appeal is his capacity for provocation: the sense that he tacitly encourages people to at least try and unpick his records, fathom his mysteries. Our almost certain failure is part of the game, for him as well as for us.

Anyway, with the release of Bob Dylan’s Tempest looming, I was thinking the other morning about a time when albums just, you know, came out. What seemed to happen was pretty straightforward. There’d be a story in Melody Maker announcing a new album by one of your favourite bands that usually gave the record a title, track listing and release date. The week the album came out, there’d be a review, maybe an interview and perhaps a full-page ad somewhere in MM, often with tour dates attached. On the day the album came out, you went to your local record shop – in my case, Derek’s in Water Street in Port Talbot – and you bought it. How simple it all seemed. Of course, when I actually started working for Melody Maker in 1974, I found there was a bit more to it, although not much more usually than a launch party. This was basically an excuse for the band, their mates and assorted journalists to have a bit of a piss-up and could hardly be described as an integral part of a carefully-plotted promotional campaign, unless you were Led Zeppelin and the party was a debauched affair in Chislehurst Caves involving naked nuns and the like, in which case the event would get a bit of a write-up in the red tops.

OK I’m going to try and be relatively brief with this – or at least as brief as one can hope to be when dealing with the longest studio album that Neil Young’s ever made. I’ve written what I hope is an exhaustive review of “Psychedelic Pill” for the next issue of Uncut, and don’t really want to repeat myself too much.

Even though each artist gets at least a 45-minute slot - and everyone on the main stage gets an hour or more - there's still a lack of epic outros at End Of The Road.

The second day of Dorset's End Of The Road is a scorcher – not bad for the first day of autumn. Van Dyke Parks must be pleasantly surprised, if he's still around.

It's the last day of summer, as Van Dyke Parks tells us, repeatedly. He's right, of course, but it's also true that there are still two days left of End Of The Road, pretty much the last festival of 2012.

50 years is a long time to wait for a book. In September 1956, Alan Garner started writing his debut novel, a children’s book set among the landscape and folklore he’d known all his life – Alderley Edge in Cheshire, 12 miles south of Manchester. First published in 1960, The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen followed the adventures of 12 year-old twins, Colin and Susan, on the Edge – “a long-backed hill… high and sombre and black.”

One bright morning a couple of weeks ago, I was unpacking CDs in my new house and found Four Tet’s “Pause” as an ideal soundtrack. Eleven years old, it still sounded wonderful: beatific but fleet of foot; contemporary in spite of folktronica, or whatever it was called (the pricelessly daft “Idylltronica” was even better), being a very fleeting fad. I think Kieran Hebden once blamed me for coming up with that folktronica tag; wrongly, I hope.

This is one film that's stuck with me since I first saw it a month or so back. Principally, it's a spin on low-rent 70s Italian horror movies; a film that both celebrates and mimics the tropes of murky gialli from filmmakers like Dario Argento.

On www.allah-las.com, the Los Angeles band of the same name have posted a bunch of unusually excellent mixtapes. The latest, “Reverberation #25”, is pretty typical, taking in the likes of Jim Sullivan and Tim Hardin as well as the group’s backwards-facing contemporaries: White Fence, Sonny & The Sunsets and another bunch out of what always seems to be an unbelievably small and cliquey LA indie scene, The Beachwood