There’s barely a dry eye in the corner of the Electric Ballroom where I’m standing when as part of the taped music that introduces Mick Jones’ Carbon/Silicon, Joe Strummer’s lovely, wistful “Willesden To Cricklewood”, the dreamy closing track of Joe’s ‘comeback’ album, Rock, Art And The X-Ray Style, plays over the PA. A lot of manly throat-clearing is then drowned out by a stentorian orchestral blast that replaces Joe’s autumnal melancholy and fair startles everyone, not least Mick Jones, who's now standing on stage, smiling nervously at cohort Tony James as the orchestral surge reaches an appropriately dramatic climax, which makes Mick laugh. “Good evening,” he says, and then in reference to the now-subsiding musical bombast that has preceded his remarks adds: “I do hope we’re not bigging ourselves up too much.” And with this, Carbon/Silicon, launch, as we are prone to say, into “The Magic Suitcase”, from their forthcoming debut album, The Last Post, which we review in the new issue of Uncut, on sale next week. Six months ago, I saw Carbon/Silicon play a fantastic set in Mick’s studio in Acton, about 30 people crammed into a tiny, sweltering place, the band no more than a couple of feet away from where I was standing in the front row, only a mixing desk between them and the whooping audience. Tonight’s show, surprisingly, is a wholly more sedate affair – maybe it’s the fairly modest size of the crowd and a muted sound, but things never seem entirely to get going, the crowd perhaps yearning for something they’ve heard before (and I’m thinking they’d be somewhat keener to hear, say, “White Riot” than “Love Missile F1- 11”, although I could be mistaken). In the event, the set’s drawn entirely from the new album – which means airings for what you can imagine soon will be much-anticipated crowd-pleasers like “Action Zulus”, “The News”, “What The Fuck”, “Really The Blues” and the admirably pounding “Why Do Men Fight?”, one of tonight's indisputed highlights. Mainly, these songs are still being played in – the band a bit short of match practice, after only a few festival appearances this summer. I’m sure they’ll sharpen quickly when they start gigging in earnest and the occasional flatness of tonight’s show will very soon be forgotten as these songs assume a more volatile momentum. As it is, there are plenty of great moments and, by God, it’s a gas to see Mick back onstage, looking brilliant, and so thoroughly enjoying himself. “Comrades! Peers! Contemporaries! Critics!” he announces before a great version of “War On Culture”, smiling, simply happy to be here. “You don’t know what it’s like to be back.” We smile back, as happy as him, Tony James similarly beaming, men on a mission, soon, you suspect, to be accomplished.

The arrival of a new Wes Anderson film is pretty much always a cause for celebration in the UNCUT office. He's a master of dry, melancholic comedies and a meticulous visual stylist, with a fine ear for music and who's surrounded himself with a peerless roster of actors -- Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and Gene Hackman among them -- who faultlessly bring his peculiar, poignant stories to life. It's perhaps emblematic of Anderson's universe that, in the production notes handed out at last night's press screening for The Darjeeling Limited, Anjelica Huston describes her character in the film as "something of an action hero nun." I am also warned, half-seriously, by the film's press officer to prepare for the continuous use of Peter Sarstedt's ballad "Where Did You Go To (My Lovely)" over the soundtrack. Oh, and Bill Murray crops up for the opening five minutes in a mute cameo. Adding an extra level of quirk to the proceedings, The Darjeeling Limited is preceeded by a 10 minute short, Hotel Chevalier, a two-hander between Schwartman and Natalie Portman set in a hotel suite in Paris, one-liners zinging like a Howard Hawks' comedy. It's the first glimpse we get of Schwartzman (who also co-wrote Darjeeling with Anderson and Roman Coppola), as Jack Whitman, the youngest of three brothers, whose fumbled attempts to reconnect with one another forms the narrative arc of Darjeeling. Anderson's films -- Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou -- occupy themselves with the strength/fragility of relationships, usually within the family unit. I was surprised at how soft (in a good way) Darjeeling is, how sweet the estranged brothers' struggle to bond is. Alongside Schwartman, there's Adrien Brody making his debut for Anderson as middle brother Peter, with the director's long-term collaborator, Owen Wilson, rounding out the family as eldest brother Francis. We know that all three boys are grieving their father's death, and there are still issues with their mother (Huston) who never attended his funeral and is now the "action hero nun" in a monastery in the Himalayas. Compounding this, Jack is vainly trying to extricate himself from a failing relationship; Peter is unsure how to react to imminent fatherhood; Frances is physically damaged, recovering from a motorbike accident, his face partly obscured by bandages for the duration of the film. At Frances' request, the three meet on board The Darjeeling Limited, a train travelling across the desert of Rajasthan. There, Frances plans, they'll embark on a more spiritual journey of their own, which will culminate with meeting their mother. To shoot on the train, Anderson and his crew borrowed 10 coaches from India's Northwestern Railways, gutted them and build their own interiors, a striking palette of traditional Indian colours and Art Deco designs every bit as extraordinary as Steve Zissou's ship, the Belafonte, in The Life Aquatic. There's also wonderful images of bright saris and the parched yellow desert; a flashback to grey, windy New York looks like the colour's been leached out of the world. I'm struck by how much I fell for the relationship between the three brothers. If I have one recurring complaint against Anderson it's that sometimes his films are too detached for me to fully engage with -- it was certainly the case with The Life Aquatic. But there's something charming about the way the three brothers' squabble (Jack, at one point, having to mace Frances and Peter to stop them from kicking the crap out of him); they seem to regress into a childhood world of scraps and arguments that's quite endearing. But it's not all funny. There's a pretty grim tragedy down the line, and it's the way the brothers' deal with it that eventually brings them closer -- tho it doesn't necessarily provide the resolution they're after. It's certainly not on a par with Tenenbaums, I've got to say, which still stands as Anderson's masterpiece in my book. But it's certainly a very charming way to spend 91 minutes. The Darjeeling Limited plays at the London Film Festival on November 1, and opens in the UK on November 23.

After a week off, holed up in the Cotswolds since you ask, it's been a busy time for film screenings. I went to see The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford on Tuesday, this time on a proper 35mm print rather than the beta tape I saw a few months back, and tonight there's Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited that I'll hopefully blog about tomorrow. Last night, though, our album reviews editor John Robinson and I went to see American Gangster, at close to three hours as epic as it gets, with Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington manfully chewing chunks out of the scenery in late Sixties/early Seventies' New York. Ridley Scott, as a director, is someone I admire greatly. Admittedly this is an opinion based largely on Alien and, especially, Blade Runner, and for every great film, there's the clang of a bollock being dropped with Matchstick Men or A Good Year. Part of Scott's problem, I think, is that as a former ad director he's naturally more drawn to mood, style and the technique of film making, rather than the direction of actors. Kingdom Of Heaven, for instance, looked fantastic -- he really got into the box of CGI tricks for the battle sequences -- but whatever compelled him to cast the feckless Orlando Bloom in the lead was sheer madness. His constant returns to Blade Runner -- a tweak here, a new print there, a digital makeover, a new cut -- has turned it into the DVD equivalent of Dark Side Of The Moon, and what's apparently his Definitive Edition of that film is due out on DVD in December. Anyway, when Scott works his best is when he can get on with the behind camera stuff and let good actors deal with the other bits. Which is fortunate, then, that he's got two on board for American Gangster. I should point out now that Allan has some fairly amusing views on Russell Crowe -- it stems, apparently, from the fact that Bud White is one of his favourite characters in literature and he thought Crowe got him completely wrong in LA Confidential. We're both agreed, though, that he's on cracking form in Master And Commander. Crowe is something of a man's actor. Recalling his close friendship with Richard Harris and Oliver Reed, forged on the set of Gladiator, you sense he'd have been right at home back in the Sixties and Seventies, drinking and roistering away with the Harris/Burton breed of carousers. You could easily see him propping up a movie like The Wild Geese, for instance. But Crowe does like to see himself as A Proper Actor these days, developing his range in movies like A Beautiful Mind (schizophrenic math's genius), Cinderella Man (washed up boxer) even A Good Year (City man goes native in rural France). They're all pretty below par movies, but taken on their own terms those central characters all offer plenty of meat for an actor. He's actually pretty subdued in American Gangster, as NY Detective Richie Roberts, struggling to bring down Denzel's crime boss, Frank Lucas. His story plays out in parallel to Lucas', Roberts' marriage gradually falling apart and Lucas raises a successful empire. In fact, both these actors are big enough to sustain their own narratives with equal weight, only meeting towards the end of the picture (it's not quite Al and Bob in Heat when they do, but hey). Washington is never less than a compelling presence on screen. I never really quite got him until Training Day, where I'll happily wheel out an adjective like "incendiary" to describe his performance. Here, he's brooding, occasionally chilling, driven and prone to swift and shocking bursts of violence when he doesn't get his own way. It's quite easy to see why American Gangster's got its 156 minute running time. It needs room for both these two characters' stories to breathe. Scott's next is with Crowe also, Nottingham, about Robin Hood no less, with Crowe as the Sherriff. Quite why the world needs to see this, I don't know -- we've had quite enough versions of this story down the years. I'm far more interested in his movie *after* that (due 2009, according to the Interweb), an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's brilliant Western novel, Blood Meridian. Scott once told me that he's always wanted to make a Western. As a kid, growing up around Newcastle, he used to go and watch oaters at his local cinema, and that pretty much got him into the movies. As a big fan of McCarthy, and Blood Meridian especially, it'll be interesting to see what he does with it. It's a violent, horrific story -- Peckinpah meets Bosch, about bounty hunters and killers and, unsurprisingly, something of a favourite round these parts. American Gangster opens in the UK on November 16.

It’s easy to be a bit snide about the Klaxons, as some of the fartish blather that greeted their Mercury Prize win proved. “Myths Of The Near Future” (was that the title?) wasn’t the best record on the shortlist, to my mind; I’ve played the Arctic Monkeys and Amy Winehouse albums more, if that’s any measure. Third best is still pretty good, though, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Klaxons were a truly futuristic band (one or two commentators claimed this after the Mercury win. I’m not even sure what “futuristic” means any more with regard to music, but never mind), I certainly like their ideas, their sense of intelligent mischief, and the suspicion that these are men who listen to a much more interesting range of music than their indie contemporaries. This last hunch is corroborated by a 2CD mix set by them, “A Bugged Out Mix”, that arrived in Uncut yesterday. If you listened to their many detractors, so anxious to stereotype, a mix CD by the Klaxons would consist of some mediocre indie-dance crossovers, some comedy rave tracks from the early and mid-‘90s, and maybe a bit of cringeingly sexy Hoxton electro. In fact, there’s precious few tunes on these two bracing CDs that you could term predictable. The presence of Blur is honest, since the bright, pushy, tuneful art-pop of “Myths Of The Near Future” distinctly recalls the earlyish manoeuvres of Damon Albarn. Even then, though, the selection of “Me, White Noise”, the hidden track on “Think Tank” featuring Phil Daniels, is thoughtful, if not entirely thrilling (“Think Tank” not doing it for me in general). The Chemical Brothers and the Klaxons’ beloved Liars being here also make some sense, as does the inclusion of Justice’s monsterish “Stress”. Chiefly, though, CD1 consists of crisp, undulating, fairly minimal techno, with a possibly Germanic tinge that suggests the Klaxons are more clued into the svelte Kompakt label than some of the tackier dance hybrids at large in East London right now. Along with James Murphy and Pat Mahoney from LCD Soundsystem’s disco-heavy Fabric mix, it’s made for long dance days in Uncut this week. “Shooting Tigers” by Markus Lange & Daniel Dexter is on now, and it’s bloody marvellous. I suspect most of you, though, will be more drawn to CD2, which begins with Zager & Evans’ “In The Year 2525”, then slips brilliantly into the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Shame On A Nigga”, which reminds me that I need to try and hunt down that new Wu album if I can. Its playing yesterday compelled the Reviews Ed to tip me off about Louise Nurding’s extraordinary version of “Shame On A Nigga”, which you can watch here if you’re mad. There are some more great juxtapositions here, like United States Of America’s “The Garden Of Earthly Delights” into Josef K’s “Sorry For Laughing”, and a great run that takes in one of those rare Todd Rundgren tracks (“Zen Archer”) where he actually lives up to his reputation, Frankie Valli’s rehabilitated “The Night”, Cluster’s “Caramel” (the Krautrock revival continues apace!) and Ariel Pink’s terrific “For Kate I Wait”. The whole thing suggests a band with great eclectic taste – maybe more like Uncut readers than you’d expect - and very good skills at making their disparate interests sync up. Also I’ve seen one or two of them loitering around the road where (for the next eight days) I live, and they look quite big, so: great work!

I went to see Atonement over the weekend -- and a very fine film it is, too -- and before the film started, the cinema showed trailers for Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart and The Kingdom, produced by Michael Mann. These are Hollywood's latest attempts to engage with George Bush's misadventures in the Middle East and the fearsome War On Terror. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 9/11 and more broadly the rest of the War On Terror have motivated Hollywood in a way that the first Gulf War never did. I can only really remember Three Kings emerging from that conflict, while movies like Fahrenheit 9/11, Control Room, United 93 and Syriana explicity deal with the War On Terror, and Munich and The Bourne Ultimatum address it by less direct means. Soon come, there's Rendition, Brian De Palma's Redacted (apparently, his best film for 20 years), Robert Redford's Lions For Lambs, which screens at the London Film Festival next month, and Imperial Life In The Emerald City, from Bourne director Paul Greengrass. There's more, too. Sure, Hollywood's dealt with conflict before, principally World War 2 and Vietnam. But those movies had a different relationship to their respective conflicts. The WW2 movies were mostly propaganda exercises, and the Vietnam cycle of films were made long after the last chopper had flown out of Saigon. Hollywood is now having to step up and deal with -- and excuse me if this sounds a bit like The Day Today's Brian O'Hanrahanrahan -- an ongoing live war situation. Of these latest two, Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, which opens this Friday in the UK, is the best. It focusses on the human interest aspect of the conflict, with Angelina Jolie as the wife of American journalist Daniel Pearl, kidnapped in Pakistan. It's an emotive subject, well handled by Winterbottom and gracefully acted by Jolie. Andrew Mueller's full review of it will be on this site by the end of the week. The Kingdom -- out at the end of October, and directed by Peter Berg -- has annoyed me incessantly since I saw it a few weeks ago. At what point does it become permissible to reduce serious, complex issues to simple multiplex headlines? When can film-makers justify as entertainment the ghastly and barbaric concept of Jihadic decapitations? These are some questions The Kingdom raises, as it struggles to create a contemporary thriller set in the Middle East. Syriana proved it was possible to address this thorny subject with intelligence and wit; The Kingdom simply ends up making you question the moral obligations of Hollywood studios. The Kingdom is Saudi Arabia. An FBI team, headed up by Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx), is sent over there to bring down a terrorist cell responsible for a suicide bombing at an American compound in Riyadh. Their investigation is hampered by the Saudi security forces, though Fleury finally finds a like-minded partner in Saudi colonel Al Ghazi. What seems to be a fairly conventional and sluggish procedural movie suddenly lurches into a PlayStation-style shoot 'em up as Fleury and his team take on the terrorists in a ferocious firefight in an apartment block. The film's producer is Michael Mann and, admittedly, it looks fantastic. There's some striking widescreen flourishes - helicopter gunships acting as outriders for a motorcade, beautiful aerial shots of Saudi at dawn - but, worryingly, there's no psychological motivation for the Jihadists. Rather like native American Indians in countless, unreconstructed Westerns, they're simply The Enemy, wild-eyed, speaking in tongues, unfathomable and terrible. "There are a lot of bad people out there," Fleury's son observes. True enough, but The Kingdom fails to offer any explanation why.