Features

In haste again this week, but various delays in posting this have at least meant that the playlist has kept growing: 32 entries, with seven interesting things to listen to, including Neil Young and a couple of strong new artists, the pretty psych Morgan Delt and Matt Kivel, whose album reminds me a bit of the first one by Bon Iver.

There’s a scene in Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country For Old Men, where sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his deputy arrive at the site of a particularly grisly murder. “It’s a mess, ain’t it sheriff?” asks the deputy. Surveying the corpses and the wreck of a burned out SUV, Bell replies, “If it ain’t, it’ll do till a mess gets here.”

Celebrating anniversaries has, I guess, become second nature in the music industry now. A quick pass through the reviews pages in the last couple of issues of Uncut reveal anniversary reissues and special editions for Nirvana, Billy Bragg, Tears For Fears, R.E.M, Four Tet and Bob Marley.

A lot of things can happen when you watch The Necks, the magnificent Australian improvising trio, play live. Sometimes, you can become fixated on prosaic details: how does Tony Buck’s left hand keep vibrating that shaker onto his drumkit at such an ecstatic velocity for so long, for instance? Do they have hidden clocks that allow them to move so elegantly to a conclusion without appearing to even acknowledge each other’s presence, let alone look at one another? Will unzipping my coat be an unacceptably noisy intervention?

Avatar has much to answer for. Blue-skinned aliens aside, James Cameron’s film was famously heralded (at least by the PR team) as the future of cinema – a digital epic to change the shape of the modern blockbuster.

As Mott The Hoople prepare to tour again this month (beginning at Birmingham’s Symphony on November 11), it seems fitting to revisit this archive piece from October 2009 (Take 149). Frontman Ian Hunter fondly remembers all the young dudes, from Bowie and Ronson to Max Wall… Interview: John Lewis

A brief moment away from collating Uncut’s end of year album charts to post this: 24 records etc we’ve played over the last couple of days in the Uncut office.

After raving about the new Alasdair Roberts and White Fence albums on the past few lists, I’m pleased to have some tracks from them this week, along with really excellent new arrivals from Kevin Morby and Ryley Walker.

As you may have seen, this week’s NME features the 2013 edition of their 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. For this one, they also accepted votes from a bunch of the mag’s alumni, including me, so I thought it’d be an easy, albeit self-indulgent, blog to reproduce my Top 50 albums here.

To Hammersmith, and the launch of The Who’s super deluxe edition of Tommy at Riverside Studios. Tonight, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey are attending a special screening of Sensation – The Story Of The Who’s Tommy, a new documentary about the album due for broadcast this Friday [October 25].