Features

Much as I love the TV On The Radio album, I wonder sometimes if all the hype surrounding David Sitek might be a bit out of hand. For a start, reading some of the stories about “Dear Science”, you’d be forgiven for imagining that he made the entire record single-handed, when in fact virtually all the songwriting was handled by the band’s vocalists and, perhaps, creative heart, Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone.

We now have the entire judges' deliberations over who should win the Uncut Music Award posted here on this blog, so I thought it might be useful to provide links to all the separate posts in one place. I was prompted, in part, by this message from Terry, who did all the recording and transcribing for us.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds began their British tour last night with an occasionally scrappy, but ultimately triumphant 19-song set at the Brighton Centre in Cave’s adopted hometown – a fact he addressed with repeated thanks to “the beautiful people of Brighton”.

I know I wrote something a bit snide about the whole “Tips For 2009” business the other day. But then, when dutifully and only slightly hypocritically compiling my submission to the BBC poll, I found myself – hugely hypocritically, I suppose – tipping one of the doubtless most-tipped tips of 2009, Florence And The Machine.

More talk from the judges today, as they get to grips with the debut from Vampire Weekend.

It’s still a few days before the next issue of Uncut comes out, but I think I can let slip that REM’s “Accelerate”, while being included in our writers’ Top 50 Albums Of 2008 chart, didn’t actually make it into the Top 40. A disappointing showing for such a hyped “return to form”, maybe.

And here we are with the judges on Radiohead. Next up, Vampire Weekend.

I found this morning a decent MP3 stream of the Dead’s Obama benefit show from last month, which has just started playing as I write. The tracklisting looks great – including “Slipknot”, “Help On The Way”, “Franklin’s Tower”, “Dark Star”, “St Stephen” and, fantastically, “Unbroken Chain”.And the starting “Truckin’”, which has been going for a good while now, sounds pretty healthy. Maybe some of the more experienced Deadheads among you could hunt it down and let me know what you think.

Today, the judges get to grips with The Raconteurs. Radiohead coming up tomorrow.

Multi-Grammy winning producer, musician and musical director Roscoe Beck