Ladies and gentlemen... please enjoy our Top 75 new albums of 2012, with links to the original reviews where possible. Tomorrow, we'll post the Top 30 best reissues, box sets and compilations.
Elbow, Band Of Horses and Hot Chip are among the new additions to the line-up for London's iTunes Festival this year.
Elbow and Bat For Lashes will play together at London's Roundhouse on September 7, while Hot Chip will headline the venue themselves on September 29.
Band Of Horses will support Jack White on September 8.
Metronomy, Savages and Coda have been added to the bill for this year's Green Man Festival.
The festival, which will be headlined by Mogwai, Feist and Van Morrison, takes place in Wales' Brecon Beacons from August 17-19.
Also newly added to the line-up are Loney Dear, Tom Williams & The Boat, Dizraeli & The Small Gods, Polaroid 85, Laid Blak and Heymoonshaker.
They join a bill that already includes Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, The Walkmen, Jonathan Richman, The Felice Brothers, Tune-Yards, Of Montreal, King Creosote & Jon Hopkins, Michael Kiwanuka and over 30 other acts.
Mogwai have been confirmed as the final headliner of this year's Green Man festival.
The Scottish rockers, who released their seventh studio album 'Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will' in 2011, join Feist and Van Morrison in headlining the event, which takes place in Wales' Brecon Beacons from August 17-19.
Also newly added to the line-up are Dexys, Cate Le Bon, Lower Dens, Benjamin Francis Leftwich, Crybaby, Paul Thomas Saunders, Stuff, Withered Hand and King Charles.
Alex Chilton’s wild, idiosyncratic life after Big Star is examined in the new issue of Uncut (Take 180, May 2012), out now. But what happened before the demise of Chilton’s greatest group? They should have been rock superstars, but Rob Jovanovic explains how drugs, in-fighting and personal tragedy meant Big Star had to settle for being the biggest cult band of all time (from Uncut's Take 94, March 2005).
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Thanks, once again, to all of you who submitted your Top Tens of 2010 to the blog at the end of the year. I’ve now applied the dark mathematics and come up with a Top 50 from them, which provides an interesting - healthy, to be honest - contrast to my own list. The winner was ahead of the pack by a mile, incidentally…
Last blog of the year, I suspect, so I thought it’d be useful to post my whole hundred in one place: apologies for the half-arsed obligation to get extra traffic which compelled me to post it in chunks, at least initially.
The first thing you would have noticed arriving in Hyde Park last Frday to see Pearl Jam is how many more people there appear to be than were here for last year’s Hard Rock Calling weekend, the size of the crowd, a hint of mob surliness and the press of people at the front of the stage something of a concern later for a visibly worried Eddie Vedder. It’s almost 10 years to the day, after all, since nine Pearl Jam fans were crushed to death during the band’s performance on June 30, 2000, at the Rosskilde festival, over there in Denmark. No wonder at one point he looks so rattled.
