Another day, another disc from the Miles Davis "On The Corner" box set, and someone (John McLaughlin?) appears to have turned up with a sitar. Most bracing. Before we embarked on this, though, we played the new Nick Cave & Warren Ellis soundtrack, a musical sequel of sorts to their score for "The Proposition" from a couple of years ago.
Could be a long day, since we've just embarked on the first CD of Miles Davis' "Complete On The Corner Sessions". Not sure we're going to make it through all six in a row, but a good start to the day. Here, though, is what we played yesterday. As usual, I can't pretend we're unequivocally behind every record on the list, but God, that Springsteen album gets better and better.
The third album by Om, a duo from San Francisco, took some pretty circuitous route to get to Uncut, or so it seemed: at least two copies of "Pilgrimage" disappeared en route, as I became more and more anxious to hear it.
Fairly curious listening day in the Uncut office, even by our standards, I think, which reached a pinnacle of sorts with a new Dead Kennedys 'Best Of' (how poppy they sound now) rubbing up next to a Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick reissue from 1966, I think.
I've been spending the past hour or so working my way through this soundtrack to Todd Haynes' Dylan movie, I'm Not There. I must admit to a bit of scepticism about the film, having actively despised Haynes' Velvet Goldmine, and been faintly terrified by the convoluted plotting and detail that was reported here.
When on July 28, 1973, The Band played the Summer Jam festival at Watkins Glen, New York, on a bill that also included The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers, Garth Hudson, if he’d been so inclined, could have looked out from the stage onto a crowed of more than 600,000 – at the time, I think, the largest-ever audience for a rock show.
Settling down into my seat at last night's press screening for Planet Terror, I overheard the chap sitting next to me giving his friend a crash course in the film's back story. "You know Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof was originally part of a double-feature called Grindhouse? Well, this is the other bit." Quite how Robert Rodriguez would respond to having his film referred to as the "other bit", I don't care to imagine, the Mexican temprament being notoriously fiery. It's a stroke of luck, then, that his name appears 7 times on the opening credits, just to reinforce the fact that there's more to Grindhouse than just Tarantino's movie.
In fact, Planet Terror is far and away the better of the two movies, Rodriquez cannily remembering to include some of those elements in his film Tarantino left out -- plot, character, humour, simple things like that. Though, thankfully, Planet Terror conspicuously lacks the rather nasty, misogynistic streak that made Death Proof such an uneasy viewing experience for me.
Now that the India vs Pakistan cricket has finished, I can turn my attention to a blog. We've also just spent an hour dipping into the Radio 1 birthday album, which features 40 of today's Top 20 habitues covering 40 years of hits. Some grim moments here, as you might imagine: Robbie Williams does "Lola"; our era's pre-eminent power trio The Fratellis having a crack at "All Along The Watchtower"; Razorlight's particularly masochistic "Englishman In New York".
