Gun club

What better way to kick off the final night of Club Uncut at The Great Escape than with a Brooklyn bar band – or indeed, a bar solo artist, the wily R'n'B raconteur Hans Chew.

Because, as I have just had pointed out to me, I have foolishly mistakenly read their name as MegaFUN, when the three members of MegaFAUN hove into view, led by a large bearded man with a banjo and a big grin, I somewhat feared they would prove to be relentlessly hearty, the distressing musical equivalent of bouncy castles, red noses, playground japes, a particularly unwelcome wackiness. The kind of jollity, in other words, that makes you want to run screaming from its larkish presence.

Beth Jeans Houghton tiptoes into the centre of Borders from behind a shelf of graphic novels, accompanied by her drummer. Wearing a black, almost-dinner dress that fans at her waist and a precarious pair of heels that could quite easily constitute a health and safety risk, her striking look is topped off by a yellow and blue striped hat with peak.

Founder member Orlando Lopez dies in Cuba aged 76

They look, famously, on the cover of last year’s Tonight At The Arizona album, like the wayward off-spring of The Band, with whose songs and music their own colourful excursions into the hinterlands of ‘the old, weird America’, as essayed by Bob and The Band on The Basement Tapes, are frequently compared.

Nineties electro-punk megastars return

From a new covers collection dedicated to The Gun Club leader

The guitarist and producer on the Cocteau Twins, The Gun Club and his latest project with Mark Gardener

Plus Cat Power, Herbie Hancock and the Cramps

Forward-looking post-punk wizardry from London quartet