Features

The appearance of Werner Herzog as the icy criminal mastermind in Tom Cruise’s most recent film, Jack Reacher, may have come as a surprise to those who assumed that the German director wouldn’t have much interest in such conventional film making.

Television and Heartbreakers legend Richard Hell’s autobiography, I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp, is reviewed by editor Allan Jones in the new issue of Uncut (dated July 2013 and out now) – in this piece from Uncut’s September 2009 issue (Take 148), Hell and his bandmates explain how they created “Blank Generation”, the nihilistic, coruscating punk anthem first written as a “My Generation” for the ’70s New York scene. Words: Damien Love

Around this time in 2012, I came up with 40 records, released between January and June, that I liked enough to include in a six-month Best-Of list. Either I’m being more diligent, or less discerning, or else 2013 is shaping up to be a better year: as you can see, I’ve managed 67 here.

Back from a week’s holiday, so plenty of new things among this 21st office playlist, with lots of the best tracks - from Cian Nugent, Lace Curtain, Houndstooth and The Cairo Gang, among others – embedded. A hairy teaser for Crazy Horse’s imminent UK dates, too, and a serendipitous reissue for Samuel Purdey’s luxe late ‘90s evocation of Steely Dan and the Doobies; curious Daft Punk fans might be advised to check out “Only When I’m With You”, especially.

Checking emails over the weekend, I was more than passingly alarmed when I got a message from a friend asking if I’d heard the news about Lou Reed. This sounded somewhat ominous. Lou has looked decidedly frail at recent London shows and he is after all 71 and despite being sober for many years has not always led the kind of lifestyle that could be described as wholly healthy. For a long time, he seemed alongside Keith Richards the rock star most likely to become a casualty of what might euphemistically be described as reckless living. Could the excesses of his past finally have caught up with him?

Just before the release of 2007’s Era Vulgaris, Uncut’s Jaan Uhelzski headed out to California to see if head wrangler Josh Homme could keep the party going when the group’s hedonistic regulars had been barred…

Although I’m currently watching films due for release in July – which will take us over halfway through 2013 – I’m conscious that there’s a lot of great stuff still to come during the rest of the year.

Getting it together in the suburbs seems to be a peculiarly middle class rite of passage – the moment when city living is no longer tenable and a migration in pursuit of wider spaces, cleaner living and better schools is required. Such considerations are behind the decision taken by Nathaniel and Julia Noailles, who with their young, Aspergersy son Copley exchange their life in Boston for a more spacious existence in Dolores Woods, a large development on the outskirts of an un-named Midwestern city, in Patrick Flanery’s tremendous new novel, Fallen Land.

I don’t know if you saw it, but BBC2’s David Bowie documentary, Five Years, screened at the weekend, was very entertaining. A lot of the archive footage was familiar, but there were also some splendidly unexpected highlights, like a sequence of Bowie filmed at Andy Warhol’s Factory, which rather vividly suggested that Bowie’s talent for mime isn’t perhaps all it’s cracked up to be in which he pretended to unspool his own entrails and pluck out his heart, a performance that was doubtless accompanied by much sniggering from Andy's crowd.

If, as internet speculation and promo footage imply, “Tomorrow’s Harvest” has a Cold War/atomic age subtext, Boards Of Canada’s focus is, as ever, long-range and aesthetic: less on the actual devastation wrought by nuclear weapons, more on nebulous creep and on the terrible beauty of a mushroom cloud when observed from a relatively safe distance. It’s a potentially glib way of toying with signifiers: Armageddon as nature documentary.