Harris bill

Read the Uncut obituary here

Tempered by T-Bone Burnett, Costello cuts a rootsy beauty

US folk siren adds muscle to her delicate songcraft

Read the actor's full transcript from our new cover feature here...

Dark glasses, darker voice…

Today: Guitarist Robben Ford talks about making Under The Red Sky

This was in a way like returning to the scene of the crime, or something like it.

Alison Krauss, Iron & Wine, Bonnie Prince Billy and Pegi Young also on the bill for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

Welcome to Waitsville. A place where bad jokes are good, Vaudeville never died, and the talk is of smoking monkeys, weasels and the mating habits of the preying mantis.

Leafing through last week's edition of Entertainment Weekly during a quiet moment in the office, I came across a three-quarter page spread devoted to a new band called She & Him. The "Him" here is M Ward while -- and this is what piqued my curiousity -- the "She" is Zooey Deschanel, the American indie actress who made her rep in David Gordon Green's brilliant All The Real Girls. It struck me, following on from Scarlett Johannson's album of Tom Waits' covers, that this is the second time in as many months an alt-Hollywood "It" Girl has made a record. Which, inevitably, led me to wonder why exactly the good ladies and gentlemen of the movie industry feel the need to divert their talents out of their immediate comfort zone and into the world of music.