Blogs

A couple of years ago when I was in Woodstock to interview Simone Felice and his band, The Duke & The King, Simone drove me around the mountains where he’d grown up, pointing out places of local and historical interest. These included Big Pink, the house on Parnassus Lane in West Saugerties, where Dylan and The Band recorded The Basement Tapes.

To celebrate the life and music of Levon Helm today, I’ve been collecting your favourite songs and clips of him over on Twitter @JohnRMulvey.

Last year, I spent a fair amount of time listening to a mighty blown-out Philadelphia band called Purling Hiss, whose mainman Mike Pollize was sprung from another excellent local band called the Birds Of Maya.

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.

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

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.

This year’s Great Escape Festival in Brighton is almost upon us, running from May 10-12 at a 30 venues across the town and featuring somewhere in the region of 300 new artists.

The reggae singer, given the rock doc treatment...

Alex Chilton’s wild, idiosyncratic life after Big Star is examined in the new issue of Uncut (Take 180, May 2012), out now. But what happened before the demise of Chilton’s greatest group? They should have been rock superstars, but Rob Jovanovic explains how drugs, in-fighting and personal tragedy meant Big Star had to settle for being the biggest cult band of all time (from Uncut's Take 94, March 2005). ________________________________