There is, of course, plenty that's wonderful about The Apprentice. Let's start with how a bunch of jumped-up estate agents, regional sales reps and “risk managers” stab each other in the back and bicker while displaying the level of intelligence usually associated with lesser Crustaceans. It’s the same reason you might watch Big Brother, so you can hoot cynically as the worst specimens that a few million years of evolution has to offer parade their tawdry, desperate dreams across the screen. The Apprentice is actually even funnier than Big Brother. Though both sets of contestants are generally motivated by the same thing – money, fame, success, greed – the Big Brother housemates are, by and large, of fairly limited aspirations. They don’t really have to do much but doss around by the pool and hope that by showing off the right amount of cleavage/character quirks/bitchiness they’ll find themselves catapulted into the limelight, or at the very least the right kind of Essex nightclub, the one frequented by Premiership footballers where the toilet seats are paved with gold. But the contestants on The Apprentice are hard-workers, driven by Gordon Gekko-like principals of corporate ruthlessness who get up early enough in the morning to press their pastel-coloured ties and blow-dry their hair. And what makes The Apprentice so howlingly funny is how self-delusional they are. They really believe they’ve got what it takes to “make it” in the cutthroat upper echelons of the business world. My favourite part of the show is when they balls up one of the tasks set at the start of each episode by Sir Alan Sugar, then turn on each other during the debriefing session in Sugar's board room like semi-rabid feral wolves to avoid being shouted at and/or sacked by Sir Alan. No one likes getting a bollocking, least of all from someone who displays the combined charm of the Mitchell brothers from EastEnders and Stalin, but it’s the way the would-be apprentices take their evisceration from Sugar with a polite “Thank you, Sir Alan,” before obsequiously departing the board room. Then, presumably, to be escorted to a small ante-chamber and stabbed to death with a poison-tipped shoe by Sir Alan’s own Rosa Klebb, Margaret Mountford. Anyway, last night’s programme was fantastic by any standards. The two teams – Alpha and Renaissance – were charged with devising a commercial for tissues. Team Alpha (why not Alpha Max? Surely that would have been more thrusting and aspirational..?) were headed up by the objectionable Alex, who looks like an also-ran from a Take That covers band and is a master at passive-aggressive, back-stabbing bastardy. He had in tow low-rent Essex boy Lee and Sloaney Lucinda, who complained about everything. Team Renaissance were led by Raef, an arrogant posho who was saddled with the equally posh through drippy Michael and self-serving Claire, who’s little more than the class bully. Team Alpha designed a tissue box that looked like a cheap cereal packet and shot an advert of concrete-clad crassness. Team Renaissance came up with a tasteful box design and hired Sian Lloyd to star in their commercial, which was remarkably tasteful and well-shot but made the fatal mistake of not really featuring the product at all. Needless to say, Team Alpha’s ad – the kind of thing you find running on daytime TV shows like Jeremy Kyle – won. And it won by dint of its absolute lack of skill, wit or imagination, but simply because the product was slapped on screen at every opportunity. There is, the conclusion runs, no room for art in business. What was fun was watching Raef and Michael throw themselves into the project. Raef, it transpires, has trod the boards in his time, while Michael ran a theatre group at university. This meant they could sit in the back a people carrier trying to out am-dram each other, Raef declaiming a windy speech, Michael singing one of Fagin’s songs from Oliver! in comedy-Jew voice. They got carried away with each other’s brilliance on the ad shoot, much back-slapping and self-congratulations, Michael declaring “You could be the next Fellini!” of Raef’s formidable skills behind the camera. Once in the boardroom, however, Michael proceeded to do for Raef pretty much what Brutus did to Caesar on, lo, those fateful ides of March. It was shameless, weasely and utterly vile. Brilliant! Alex, meanwhile, was pretty flat as a team leader, and really only won because Team Renaissance singularly failed to grasp that the point of a commercial is to sell a product. Also, why on earth did Raef get a TV weather forecaster to advertise tissues..? The mind, she boggles. So, Alex and Claire – who I loathe equally, by the way – lived to fight another day. Which is great, because it gives me reason to risk an aneurism hurling spit-flecked obscenities at my TV set next week. Who do you think, then, should win The Apprentice? And how long until the next series of Masterchef...?

“This is an old song,” says AA Bondy, introducing the next number in his opening set at the third Club UNCUT night at the Borderline. He’s not kidding, either. What I had presumed would be some lost early gem from his back catalogue turns out to be a dark and powerfully brooding version of Blind Willie Johnson’s apocalyptic “John The Revelator”, originally recorded in 1930, which is going back some. With his deft acoustic finger-picking, wheezing harmonica, tousled charisma and literate songs of warning and distress, Bondy himself also seems like a throwback to another age, a time of Greenwich Village folk singers, protest songs, packed clubs on Bleecker and McDougal Streets, and revolution in the air, as Dylan put it on “Tangled Up In Blue”. “Black Rain, Black Rain” is as forlorn as its title suggests, “Vice Rag” a blackly hilarious hymn to self-destructive inclinations, whose sentiments are echoed also on “Killed Myself When I Was Young”. Highlight of Bondy’s brief set, however, is, as he tartly describes it, “a song about coming from the Southern states of America that isn’t called, ‘Yes, I Can Read’.” It’s called, in fact, “The Night Comes Rolling In”, a song as fragile and evocative as Ryan Adams’ “Oh My Sweet Carolina”. If you want to hear more of Bondy’s songs, his American Hearts album, on Fat Possum, is definitely worth getting. Tonight was a perfect moment to finally catch Okkervil River, Will Sheff’s blisteringly good Austin six-piece, who won’t too often in the future be playing places as small as this, their career taking some kind of flight with the success in America of last year’s The Stage Names album. When they come back for more dates in November, they’ll be playing the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, but when Sheff stares out at the 200 or so people crammed in the tiny Borderline, I’m sure all he can see already is multitudes, the music Okkervil River are playing certainly big enough for the stadiums they may yet be headed for. Live, the band are louder, looser, rougher and even more dynamic than on The Stage Names, which itself was a musically thrilling progression from the more quilted textures of Black Sheep Boy, the 2005 album whose songs were partially based on the life of doomed singer-songwriter Tim Hardin. The latter album is briefly represented tonight, but it’s the wilder stuff from The Stage Names that sets the place on fire, Sheff delivering the delirious verbosity of his songs with an evangelical fervour, lankily reminiscent in his smart back suit of the young T-Bone Burnett wearing one of Ryan Adams’ less successful haircuts. The band, meanwhile, rage behind him with the unfettered aplomb of The Hold Steady, some numbers building to a panoramic sweep redolent of The Arcade Fire, without, I would hasten to add, that band’s occasional drift towards the pompously self-regarding. The Motown-inspired “A Hand To Take Hold Of The Scene” is thrillingly dispatched, Scott Brackett’s cornet to the fore on the song’s irresistible chorus. “Our Life Is Not a Movie Or Maybe” builds like something vintage from the E Street Band’s repertoire, pounding drums at times the only support for Sheff’s vocal implorations, the band then blowing off the roof as they join in the increasingly unhinged instrumental fray, Sheff, both hands gripping his microphone, guitar slung over his shoulder, neck down, now reminiscent of a latter-day Joe Strummer. On the slower, beautiful “A Girl In Port”, Sheff does something I haven’t seen many performers do at the Borderline, which is reduce the place to respectful, awe-struck silence, even the yahoos at the bar for the moment mute. “Unless It’s Kicks” – featured recently on Uncut’s Ooh La La covermount – is unbelievably fierce, takes off like something rocket-fuelled, its trajectory a flaming arc, almost out-of-control, Sheff more than ever reminding me of Paul Dano as Eli Sunday in There Will Be Blood. Even better, the night’s ultimate highlight, in fact, is “John Allyn Smith Sails”, inspired like The Hold Steady’s “Stuck Between Stations”, by the suicidal American poet John Berryman, who in the song, as much as life, is an emasculated alcoholic, impatient for death. “I was breaking in a case of suds at the Brass Rail, a fall-down drunk with his tongue torn out and his balls removed,” Sheff sings, a broken man waiting for the end. “And I knew that my last lines were gone, while, stupidly, I lingered on. . .” The song’s climactic, roaring appropriation of The Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B” is a stroke of grim genius and here assumes a desperately fearsome momentum, seems wholly disinclined to come to any sort of end, and so doesn’t for what seems some time, all of it unforgettable. A sensationally good night.

Welcome to our first report from this year's Cannes Film Festival, featuring Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski... Cannes, this year as ever, is about reputations. Some live up, others don't, but in 2008 the big directors are hanging onto their mantle while the arthouse darlings are slipping. Towering over the festival this year, Clint Eastwood is easily in the former camp, bringing a fantastic new film, Changeling (or is it The Exchange? The title keeps, ahem, changing), that proves that, at 78, Eastwood is effortlessly maintaining the rich twilight of an already magnificent career. Starring Angelina Jolie, it's a period drama set in LA, 1928, with Jolie as a telephone exchange manager bringing up her son alone. After unexpectedly called into the office, she leaves her son at home, returning later to find him gone. Five months later, the boy is traced by the police and the two are reunited, but the mother isn't so sure they're got the right kid. Nonsense, say the LAPD, and if that sentence makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, you're in for a treat. Riffing on issues of corruption and heavy-handed police procedures that have informed Chinatown and LA Confidential, Changeling is a modern Hollywood masterpiece, a stupendous compendium weaving all the classic genres – crime thriller, neo-noir, courtroom drama – that US cinema serves best, boasting an amazing lead performance by Jolie. John Malkovich is solid, too, as the anti-LAPD preacher who supports her one-woman crusade. But the best thing about Eastwood's latest is its constant ability to surprise. Oscars surely beckon, and it deserves them. After all, No Country For Old Men was here in competition last year and look what happened there. Another director getting his umpteenth wind is Woody Allen, who shocked the Croisette by following the dreadful Cassandra's Dream with the wonderful Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Scarlett Johannson and Rebecca Hall play two Americans on vacation in Spain, but their thunder is quickly stolen by Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz as a bohemian painter and his crazy ex-wife. It's not trad Woody, in terms of wit and irony, but it is wistful, heartfelt and dizzyingly sexy, culminating in a coy lesbian scene between Scarlett and Cruz that has already appeared in grainy frame-grabs in shady newspapers all over the world. But this festival hasn't simply been about the defending of good reps. Tyson, a wonderful doc by James Toback, shows the demonised boxer defending his media image as a vicious thug, rapist and jailbird. While these things are, to varying degrees, true, the former world heavyweight champion emerges as a sympathetic if not entirely likeable figure, plagued by demons and cursed with a frustrated intellect that punches way below the weight of his poetic soul. Another bad guy given the spotlight treatment is Roman Polanski in Wanted And Desired, a sometimes brilliant but, like its subject, sometimes maddeningly contradictory study of the diminutive Polish film maker. Using fabulous archive footage, it goes a little soft on Polanski's unrepentant attitude, but nevertheless reveals some startling truths about the legal madness that inspired him to skip town before sentencing after pleading guilty to statutory rape of a thirteen year old girl. Needless to say, Polanski isn't in the film or in town for its screening, but it's a measure of this fine, if low-key festival, that his presence isn't missed. We'll be back for a final report when the festival closes.

“NEW HARMONY ON AN AWESOME SCALE,” announces Will Oldham on “Missing One”. Somewhere in the shadows, there’s a singer called Ashley Webber playing a discreet Emmylou to his Gram, the latest harmonious foil chosen to track his tremulous voice. Oldham’s voice is much less wayward than it was on the Palace and early Bonnie “Prince” Billy records, of course, but it’s strange how he’s recently found it useful to match his voice against another: on “The Letting Go”, Dawn McCarthy from Faun Fables; on last year’s overlooked covers set, “Ask Forgiveness”, Meg Baird from Espers. Ashley Webber is an interesting recruit, though, because I can’t recall hearing much of her singing previously. Webber figures as part of the extended line-up – on keyboards, if memory serves? - of the Pink Mountaintops, Stephen McBean’s Velvetsy spin-off from Black Mountain. It transpires, though, that Webber’s voice – stirring, fulsome, warmly forlorn – is uncannily similar to that of her sister, Amber, who sings with Black Mountain and yet another of that band’s multiple worthwhile offshoots, Lightning Dust. “So Everyone”, the third song on “Lie Down In The Light”, begins strikingly like a Lightning Dust song, Ashley Webber’s voice so starkly exposed and windswept. In general, though, the album represents a further humanising, it seems, of the Bonnie Billy character. Where once it was easier to stereotype Oldham’s stage persona, however much it seemed in constant flux, as something of a hillbilly visionary, possibly with blood on his hands, now he seems a much more reliable and approachable figure, preoccupied with the kinder possibilities of human experience. The temptation, of course, is to assume that this soft-singing man who, in the wonderful “Other’s Gain”, counsels, “Keep your loved ones near” is somehow the ‘real’ Will Oldham. But the realities of this actor, singer-cinematographer, ever-evasive game-player are so obfuscated, it seems unlikely to be so straightforward. After all, 15-odd years of Oldham’s absorbing music have taught us, perhaps better than any other artist of that period, that authenticity has nothing to do with the emotional potency of a song. So here we are, with Oldham following the lighter path that he hinted at on “I’m Lovin’ The Street”, the sole original song on “Ask Forgiveness”. Only the opening track here, “Easy Does It”, approaches that song for actual jauntiness There’s a playful spring in his step as he picks his way through the fiddle and harmonies, past a rollicking Nashville piano part from Tony Crow (Lambchop, Silver Jews and so on) that echoes the work done by Hargus Robbins on “Greatest Palace Music”. The Oldham album it reminds me most of, however, is “Ease Down The Road”, one of the first times he showed a warmth and adopted a more leisurely gait. “Lie Down In The Light” is not an immediate album: I received it a week ago (I think it’s actually on sale now), and it’s only this morning, really, that the strength of songs like “Other’s Gain” and “Willow Trees Bend” have become apparent. After so long, I feel I sometimes take Oldham’s stunning consistency, a consistency that endures even while he shuffles his collaborators so frequently and quests for new challenges, for granted. But this is a lovely record, and one I’ll revisit.

To the Vortex at midnight. Considering it’s still only March, I’ve seen some pretty remarkable gigs this year: Portishead, Vampire Weekend and the mighty Raconteurs last week; Peter Walker’s flamenco/raga masterclass; Neil Young soloing endlessly into the full glare of a Klieg light, and so on. The full story is at my daily blog over here.

To the Vortex at midnight. Considering it’s still only May, I’ve seen some pretty remarkable gigs this year: Portishead, Vampire Weekend and the mighty Raconteurs last week; Peter Walker’s flamenco/raga masterclass; Neil Young soloing endlessly into the full glare of a Klieg light, and so on. Last night, though, was one of the best yet. The Necks, as I’ve mentioned before, are a piano/double bass/drums trio from Australia. Apparently, their music is completely improvised: they arrive onstage, start playing, and work their way to some kind of conclusion about an hour later. Here, they’re playing the Vortex jazz club in Dalston. One show, in the evening, features two sets, and was sold out ages ago. This one begins at midnight, and features just one traditionally elongated, utterly absorbing piece. It begins, not atypically, with a genteel, romantic solo flurry from the pianist, Chris Abrahams, a player who hovers delicately somewhere between, very roughly, Alice Coltrane and Steve Reich. Gradually – well, comparatively rapidly by their measured standards – the Necks pick up speed and intensity. Tony Buck has a cosmic cluster of bells out of sight behind his drumkit, and is meticulously working at his snare with a scrubbing brush. Lloyd Swanton stands with his eyes closed, seemingly meditating on every nuance of the music, waiting to make his discreet entry. When he does, he sways along with his double bass, holding it like a sailor clinging to the mast in a storm. Soon – after maybe ten minutes, though I’m not looking at my watch to verify –the music has become full and intense, with great pointillist clusters of piano notes and a relentless flutter of cymbal and snare and bells which remind me of the Boredoms circa “Seadrum”. My sketchy knowledge of jazz means the rock references come easier to me, so there’s something of Can here, too, and Swanton’s frantic bowing at his bass adds a thickness that’s oddly reminiscent of Sonic Youth, something like “Cross The Breeze”, perhaps. What they create here – without ever looking at each other, weirdly – isn’t something spacious and near-ambient like “Townsville” or “Mosquito”, but instead a kind of sombre rapture. It’s extraordinary, and so compelling that I find myself, a gauche non-musician, wondering how the hell they do it. Do they use rehearsed themes as a springboard? Do they try and surprise each other – I suspect not, since unlike some other free music, what the Necks do is distinctly harmonious rather than competitive. And how does this piece – a relatively pithy 45 minutes, it turns out – fit in with the two they played earlier? One of the many joys of The Necks is learning their minute, exquisite variations, while not being entirely aware of the full picture. What is the full extent of their range? How do they evolve and fluctuate? And how tired must they be at the end of the evening? Walking to the bus stop, a fox crosses my path and walks slowly across Kingsland Road, stops, looks, cocks its leg against a lamp-post, and pads elegantly down Sandringham Road. I wonder if it does that every night, two or three times, too?