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A nice surprise, last week, when Julian Cope sent over his new double vinyl album, “Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse”. A surprise, because I thought I might have been blackballed after struggling with some of the attitudes that came to the surface on last year’s musically excellent “Black Sheep”.

When I went off on my annual start-of-year rant about hotly-tipped new bands in January (and Lord, I’ve been forced to rethink my opinions about Florence And The Machine after seeing her shocking performance with Glasvegas at the NME Awards), I mentioned that, in the midst of so much electropop, “Maybe even Peaches might get a bit more love as the result of all this, which would be great.”

Some news that, we hope, will put a bounce in your Wednesday afternoon.

Not quite as long a playlist as usual this week, chiefly because Number Nine here – The Grateful Dead live at “Winterland 1973” – is a box set of nine CDs, and we played the first three, comprising the entire set from November 9, straight through yesterday. November 10 and 11 to come in the next couple of days, if my colleagues will let me get away with it, then there’s a 3CD set from around the time of “Terrapin Station” to have a go at, too.

Been a while since we had some Boredoms activity to write about here – since, perhaps, “Super Roots 9”, their live recording plus choir, came out on Thrill Jockey.

A quick caveat first. I only have seven tracks of this new Jarvis Cocker album, “Further Complications”. According to the lengthy note from Jarvis which accompanies them, the other eight aren’t “in a fit state to be listened to at the present time.”

In my ignorance, the last time I blogged about the Flower-Corsano Duo, I wrote some stuff about Mick Flower’s instrument, the shahi baaja, and described it, as per the press-release, as a "Japanese electric dulcimer/autoharp".

'Kurt Cobain raised the bar for us'...

Some very satisfying words in album titles this week, if you’ll forgive the fairly tangential way of starting a blog: “Veckatimest”, “Bitte Orca”, and today, “Balf”. “Balf Quarry” is the new album from the Magik Markers – according to the sleevenotes, “A stone quarry in Hartford, CT which has mined traprock since the earliest days of the city.”

First off, an important plug for Allan's blog, where he's posted a preview of the new Bob Dylan album, "Together Through Life". No copy in the Uncut office as yet, but I'll try and write something myself when it turns up.