The the

Suede have scrapped the majority of the material their aired at their comeback gigs last year - and have returned to the studio with the man who produced their first four albums. Ed Buller is now helming the album, which will be the reunited Britpop band's first in over a decade. Writing on the band's Facebook page, singer Brett Anderson said that the they had been "merrily chipping away at the huge block of raw stone that is, whisper it, the new Suede album" and posted a picture of them together. He added:

In case you missed them yesterday, I’ve embedded the two new Animal Collective tracks after the jump. Back into relative focus after the “Transverse Temporal Gyrus” thing, and with Avey Tare seemingly to the the fore; he almost seems to be rapping at the start of “Honeycomb”.

Sam Shepard himself takes a rare lead in Blackthorn, which expands on the theories that Butch Cassidy somehow survived the shoot out at San Vicente, Bolivia in 1908. “I woke up and found myself alone,” he explains. “Seemed like everybody I knew was either dead or in jail. And they thought I was dead, too. So I did what any good dead person would do. I went off and raised me some horses. 20 years. That’s a big change. Quiet times.” Cassidy, in his twilight years, decides to return to America, to be reunited with family.

This comes in a cute Dansette-style box stuffed with ten albums of antique Kinkorama and Meet the Kinks!, a fab 1960s style booklet with rare fab pix. For complete retro-authenticity, everything is in mono, this being how the original records were released back in those sacred days (so sacred that “Days” itself is now the theme tune for a car advert).

Singer has his eye on penning tunes for the theatre

The eclectic mix of Latitude's tents and stages provided a perfect setting for the theatricality of Brighton's The Mummers, whose early Friday afternoon set lit up the Uncut Arena, but would have been equally at home almost anywhere on the site.

I first met film maker Andrea Arnold at the Sundance festival in 2003, when she was premiering her short film, Wasp. An eventual Oscar winner, Wasp was a bleak but compelling slice of socio-realist cinema about a single mother trying to raise her kids on a claustrophobic London council estate. Arnold revisits, to some degree, the themes of Wasp for Fish Tank, her second full-length feature. Already highly praised in Cannes – it was one of only three British films in competition – it’s certainly the best film I’ve seen since arriving in Edinburgh.

A brief dispatch, since I'm fending off hordes of enraged Smashing Pumpkins fans, some of them Argentinian. My crimes are many, but involve bad grammar, liking Zwan and, OK, disrespecting the the untouchable genius of Billy Corgan.

The Babyshamble hosts two special evenings at the theatre

Talk about narrow fucking escapes. Halfway through one of the interviews with Brian De Palma that make up the raft of extras on this special edition of his lavish gangster epic, the director mentions that Paramount's first choice for the central part of Eliot Ness was Mel Gibson. It's an appalling thought. I mean, imagine Mel hamming it up here, his narcissistic gurning turning De Palma's operatic vision into mugging farce. Fortunately, Mel had other commitments, and the role of Ness, as De Palma had always intended, went to the then relatively unknown Kevin Costner.