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I received an email a while back from an Uncut writer who’d just played “Acid Tongue” for the first time. “I can reveal that on this Jenny Lewis,” they wrote, “her father gets it in the neck, in the way her mother got it in the neck last time... pretty good.”

When Klaus Dinger died a few months ago, I mentioned in an obit here that I had an unpublished interview with Dinger and Michael Rother, from when they briefly reunited to promote the Neu! reissues in 2000.

One of my favourite pieces of music, especially on bright mornings like today, is “A Rainbow In Curved Air” by Terry Riley, a great fluttering organ-led salute to the sun that put a psychedelic spin on the new classical/electronic/minimalist music that came to the fore in the ‘60s.

A whole heap of jealousy towards the residents of Los Angeles last weekend, since the Boredoms followed up last year’s 77-drummer extravaganza in New York with 88 Boadrum there on 8/8/08. I’m sure you can guess how many drummers were involved this time round, and as soon as I manage to hunt down an MP3, I’ll try and post some links.

This week's playlist, then. Still no sign of the complete Bob Dylan album, I'm afraid, though compensation of sorts comes from The Grateful Dead's "Rocking The Cradle", which proves that their 1978 shows by the pyramids in Egypt weren't quite as shabby as myth has suggested. "Fire On The Mountain" and "Shakedown Street", in particular, are strong enough to make me want to re-evaluate that late '70s studio stuff.

As someone who has spent a good decade lavishing praise on/making excuses for Julian Cope’s music while so many of his old fans have wandered off in dismay at another Brain Donor CD, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at being one of the very few people who enjoyed his show at Latitude last month. I blogged about this captivating spectacle at length over here, so won’t go into it all again now.

It was back in March that Tropic Thunder first made it onto my radar. I was skimming through a copy of Entertainment Weekly, and found a full-page picture of Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jnr in combat fatigues, rifles at the ready, creeping through the brush in a jungle setting clearly meant to represent Vietnam. What struck me, first, was the idea of these excellent comic actors making a Vietnam spoof could be a brilliant wheeze; secondly, the rather jaw-dropping fact that Downey was in blackface.

A few weeks back, while grappling with the earthshattering business of a new Coldplay album, I kicked off a discussion about Brian Eno’s recent track record. I was confounded by his taste for generally working with giant and, to my ears, fundamentally quite conservative bands. After literally decades of hitching his wagon to the likes of Coldplay, U2 and, lest we forget, James, I found it fascinating that Eno still retained a profound avant-garde cachet. Have we been letting him get away with a lot of mediocre music, just because he talks cleverly about it?

We’ve been watching the cricket as usual at Uncut today, but even I’ve noticed that the Olympics have kicked off this afternoon. A useful reminder of this is the fact that an embargo has been lifted this morning on reviewing Damon Albarn’s Monkey CD; the studio recalibration of his Chinese opera, “Monkey: Journey To The West”.

It’s been a weird 18 months or so for Richard Swift, ever since he released a major label concept album, “Dressed Up For The Letdown”, about his previous failures to gain recognition, only to see it flop. I suppose Swift has spent the intervening months desperately trying not to write another bunch of songs about this weird career arc. But instead, his career has taken some pretty eccentric diversions.