Reading a magazine this morning, I noticed that there are a bunch of tribute shows to Elliott Smith coming up; ostensibly I guess to commemorate the fact that, horrifyingly, the tenth anniversary of his death is coming up in a couple of months.
It’s Record Store Day on Saturday; a kind of weird, but necessary I guess, annual event that’s become a critical point in release schedules. I’ve been going through the lists of releases at recordstoreday.com and thought it might be worth picking out a few things that are worth looking out for.
Increasingly, a fair amount of the day’s business is built on canny catalogue management aimed at collectors (especially vinyl fetishists), and there are a bunch of things here that fall roughly into that sector:
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has said that he thinks the three imprisoned members of the punk collective Pussy Riot should be freed.
Though he admits that he was "sickened" by their 'punk prayer' protest, the Wall Street Journal reports that during a meeting of the United Russia party, Medvedev said: "Prolonging their time in prison in connection to this case seems unproductive."
The new April issue of Uncut, out now, features David Bowie peering from the cover in his guise as sleazy space-star Ziggy Stardust. To celebrate this look at Bowie’s greatest creation 40 years on, here’s a fantastic piece from Uncut’s 18th issue, in November 1998, in which Chris Roberts looks back at the glammed-up, transgressive superstars who changed his adolescent world.
