Features

Spent more time yesterday than I possibly should have piecing together a playlist out of my Neu!, Harmonia and Michael Rother albums, in preparation for tomorrow’s London show by Hallogallo 2010. Anyone seen them yet? I’d be interested to hear your reports if you have.

How to find a way through the arcane catalogue of the Sun City Girls? Last time I tried to count, there seemed to be around 60-odd releases, mostly rare as hen’s teeth, compounding the mythology of the band as among the most challenging and elusive of the past 20 or 30 years. Now, some three years after the death of Charles Gocher, there’s one last unexpected SCG album, and with characteristically perverse logic, expert word is that it may be their most accessible.

A fairly inhospitable place to be on a Sunday night: just on the edge of the City, near Old Street roundabout, in the cellar of what used to be an almost permanently empty Chinese restaurant. This is the venue for, I think, only the second London show by Emeralds, a night subtitled “A Brave New World In Sound”.

To the capital’s glamorous West End, then, and the Opening Night Gala of this year’s London Film Festival at the Odeon Leicester Square. Introducing this film adaptation of his novel Never Let Me Go, the author Kazuo Ishiguro hailed the film’s stars – Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield – as being at the forefront of a new generation of actors. Arguably, Ishiguro was whipping up a bit of hyperbole, but Never Let Me Go is part of a slow shift away from heritage Brit drama towards a more subversive and questioning style of movie-making.

Very taken by the Blackest Rainbow label at the moment, thanks to things like the Wooden Wand album I blogged about last week, the Beggin’ Your Pardon Miss Joan album and various Natural Snow Buildings projects.

Plenty new here, though that might not be the right word for the Dylan mono versions which turned up here on a USB stick last week.

The set-up of this piece is a bit out of date, since I wrote it a month ago for the current issue of Uncut. Nevertheless, worth running here I think, not least because I've subsequently discovered Forest Swords' "Dagger Paths" is getting a CD release in the UK on No Pain In Pop.

The arrival this week of a second new Wooden Wand album prompted me into finally getting round to “Death Seat”, James Jackson Toth’s terrific return after what, for him, seems to have been a relatively quiet stretch.

No Polish epiphanies this week, sadly: thanks, by the way, for all your Czeslaw Niemen guidance – you’re invaluable.

What's this, you say? The Coen brothers remaking a John Wayne classic? With the Dude, no less, as Rooster Cogburn? Is this just the latest curveball from the Coens, the kind of twisted joke they're often accused of playing on their audience? This was, roughly, the initial reception last year when news broke that the Coens were eyeing up True Grit. And, last week, the trailer finally arrived to prove they were serious.