Features

“I feel like a stand-up comic who’s not getting any laughs,” says Patti Smith self-deprecatingly, as she presents a playback of her new album, Banga, to a specially invited audience in London. This is the first time anyone has listened to the record, she tells us – not even the band or Patti's record company have yet had the privilege of hearing it. The venue for this auspicious event is the old Scotch Of St James club in Mayfair, the principal hang out for Swinging London’s finest.

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.

As this month’s new Uncut (May 2012, Take 180) features Brian Fallon talking about The Gaslight Anthem’s upcoming new album, Handwritten, we thought it would be fitting to dig out this Uncut feature from January 2010 – in which Fallon tells Jaan Uhelszki how he became a rumbustious, show-stealing international phenomenon, beloved even by The Boss himself. Not bad for a tattooed punk kid whose “mother fed me Born To Run with my Cheerios”…

After last week’s notable arrival of Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Americana”, Playlist 14 is somewhat sketchier. Harder than usual for me to get behind a fair bit of this list, as a consequence – though as you can see, there’s still at least one very interesting new entry…

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). ________________________________

Hopefully those of you who subscribe to Uncut will be starting to receive your copies of the new issue this morning (For the rest of you, it should be on sale tomorrow).

Back in the office after a day off, but this is more or less what we played earlier in the week. First up this morning is the new Hot Chip album, which makes for a very good start to the day.