Features

A bit of a sketchy bunch this week, as you’ll see. But the TV On The Radio album is getting played daily at least once, and there’s an auspicious new Mystery Record for me to be all cagey about.

Much as I like a fair bit of hardcore, there’s a slightly dim earnestness surrounding some contemporary bands on the scene (like the musically quite interesting Gallows, I suppose) that can sometimes be irritating. Obviously I can sympathise with the ideology, but I guess I’ve reached a point in life where I don’t need to be lectured on the multifarious iniquities of the music business - or the iniquities of life, come to that - in such artless terms.

Don LaFontaine 1940 - 2008 It’s a fair bet that you don’t recognise the name. But the voice, surely, is as iconic to moviegoers as Harry Lime’s final act appearance in The Third Man, Omar Sharif’s entrance in Lawrence Of Arabia or the great white’s tail fin in Jaws. Don LaFontaine was the unseen star of Hollywood; he was the guy who provided over 5,000 gravely voiceovers for movie trailers.

Joey Burns and John Convertino of Calexico talk about new LP

Judging by the activity on the blog about “Golden Age”, there’s a fair amount of excitement about TV On The Radio’s “Dear Science”. And, now that I’ve heard the album properly a few times, I reckon it’s pretty justified: this is the best record the band have made by a mile.

The movie career of Steve Coogan has so far proved to be a fascinatingly erratic subject. Sure, it’s not unusual to find a successful British TV comedian struggle to establish himself in movies, particularly in Hollywood. For every Dudley Moore, who became a huge movie star in the States with Arthur and 10, you only have to look at Peter Cook - the true genius in that partnership - whose transatlantic film career barely made it beyond Supergirl.

It occurred to me, some time after filing the AC/DC blog on Friday, that I’ve been a bit slack at covering underground stuff (“Interstellar Overdrive” notwithstanding) for the past week or two.

A quick one today, as Brian Johnson might say. I was subbing some copy for the next issue this morning, where a rock star who shall remain nameless for another four weeks revealed that he’d choose the Benny Hill theme as seduction music. AC/DC always seem like the rock equivalent of that, in many ways – so squalid, so repetitive. And yet, as I may have mentioned before, I can’t think of many bands I’ve seen live and enjoyed so much.

A slight bias towards reissues this week, as we've been digging deep into a ten-CD box set of Philip Glass' greatest hits and, since they turned up yesterday, neat new reissues of the first six Creedence Clearwater Revival albums.

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