Features

Last night [July 16], the BBC pulled a documentary about last summer’s riots just hours before transmission after a court ruling prevented it from being broadcast. It’s foolish, of course, to speculate who initiated proceedings and for what purpose - although at the risk of sounding paranoid, you suspect there’s plenty of people who’d rather not have such pesky reminders of the riots on our screens in the run up to the Olympics.

Twenty years of touring and recording, of inspiration and graft for moderate acclaim, and it comes down to this. Mark Kozelek, the pivot of first Red House Painters and now Sun Kil Moon, is engaged in one more slog around Europe. It is not going well.

Today, as you may have heard, is apparently the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first gig.

Following music on Twitter, it sometimes feels as if a hyped album or a track is listened to for, at best, six hours now before it becomes in some way obsolete: if it’s not trending, it must be passé.

With the death of Ernest Borgnine, aged 95, it feels like yet another precious link back to a golden era of Hollywood film making has gone.

There’s a batch number of high-profile music documentaries out this year – Kevin Macdonald’s Marley and Joe Berliner’s Paul Simon films have already arrived, with the Rolling Stones, the Stone Roses and Fillmore East projects yet to come. But truffle a little deeper and you’ll find some less well-known but equally rich stories deserving attention.

I wrote a long review of the new Sun Kil Moon album, "Among The Leaves", in the latest edition of Uncut. This is the unedited version of the email interview I conducted with Mark Kozelek that runs alongside the piece. Pretty funny and revealing, I think, not unlike his new album.

The new issue of Uncut (Take 183, dated August 2012) features a ‘first listen’ to Animal Collective’s new album, Centipede Hz – so in this week’s archive feature, we revisit the band in São Paulo in 2009, just after the release of their acclaimed Merriweather Post Pavilion. Stephen Troussé heads to Brazil to talk Christina Aguilera, musique concrète and the Grateful Dead… –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

A lot of amazing reissues in the mix this week: alongside that big Laurie Spiegel I mentioned last week, there are fine records from Don Cherry, Nick Cave, ZZ Top and of course GZA, whose extraordinary solo debut now appears to be coming complete with a chess set.

When Bob Dylan played Hop Farm in 2010, it was the hottest weekend of the year and there seemed to be more people at the festival than the site could hold. There were queues for everything and queues to join those queues were not uncommon. By early afternoon, you could barely move for the people already there and the constant stream of new arrivals who added to an already considerable mass.