Reviews

Solo album from former Reindeer Section and Snow Patrol collaborator

Scottish seven-piece deliver John Peel's favourite album of the year

High-quality laptop jazztronica from the prolific Chicago-based collective

Joni's lost '80s, retrieved and repackaged

Staggeringly diverse re-releases from Belgian label a decade ahead of its time

John Grisham adaptation asks searching questions

First sequel to The Ipcress File, with Michael Caine as blockbuster spy author Len Deighton's bespectacled kitchen-sink Bond, Harry Palmer. Made in 1966, it doesn't have that first film's grubby chic, and the convoluted double-crossing gets almost impossible to follow, but there's much to enjoy, not least Berlin in all its drab Cold War glory, and Caine's sullen, funny, unblinking cool as he travels there to unravel the story surrounding a Soviet officer wishing to defect.

Volker Schlöndorff's hallucinatory adaptation of Günter Grass' novel is a slow build. Like Apocalypse Now, with whom it shared the 1979 Palme D'Or at Cannes, it's an allegorical war movie with a trippy central conceit—three-year-old Oskar (David Bennent), disgusted by petty-bourgeois post-war Poland, refuses to mature into adulthood and instead opts for a surreal journey into the dark heart of Nazism. While his Danzig neighbourhood is consumed by Hitler frenzy, Oskar is subjected to Nazi dwarves, decapitated donkeys and suicide by raw eel overdose.

John Peel relives The Undertones' brief but brilliant career with the five founding members, friends, helpers and some great old clips. Describing the problems of success, the rift with Feargal Sharkey and the final split, the band defend their reformation with a new singer.

Big-voiced, deep soul belter. From Devon, obviously