A house

Anyway, with the release of Bob Dylan’s Tempest looming, I was thinking the other morning about a time when albums just, you know, came out. What seemed to happen was pretty straightforward. There’d be a story in Melody Maker announcing a new album by one of your favourite bands that usually gave the record a title, track listing and release date. The week the album came out, there’d be a review, maybe an interview and perhaps a full-page ad somewhere in MM, often with tour dates attached. On the day the album came out, you went to your local record shop – in my case, Derek’s in Water Street in Port Talbot – and you bought it. How simple it all seemed. Of course, when I actually started working for Melody Maker in 1974, I found there was a bit more to it, although not much more usually than a launch party. This was basically an excuse for the band, their mates and assorted journalists to have a bit of a piss-up and could hardly be described as an integral part of a carefully-plotted promotional campaign, unless you were Led Zeppelin and the party was a debauched affair in Chislehurst Caves involving naked nuns and the like, in which case the event would get a bit of a write-up in the red tops.

Muse and their record label Warner Music are facing a $3.5 million (£2.2 million) lawsuit from a man who claims that they "ripped off" their 2009 track Exogenesis from his sci-fi rock opera of the same name. Charles Bolfrass filed the lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan last week and has accused the band of stealing his "cinematic science-fiction rock opera" called 'Exogenesis', reports Courthouse News.

The desert rockers soak up some New Orleans spirit, with refreshing results...

The internet has been hit with speculation after Led Zeppelin posted a cryptic status update on their official Facebook page on Saturday [September 8], the day after a Led Zeppelin Twitter account launched. Fans have been speculating what the picture of the word 'five' - written in same typeface as the Led Zeppelin logo for the Houses Of The Holy album – means, with many guessing that it could be a reference to an up-coming release of their 2007 O2 reunion concert on DVD. A Twitter account also went live on Friday [September 7], with a simple "Hello".

Bob Dylan’s fantastic new album opens with a train song. Given the wrath to come and the often elemental ire that accompanies it, not to mention all the bloodshed, madness, death, chaos and assorted disasters that will shortly be forthcoming, you may be surprised that what’s clattering along the tracks here isn’t the ominous engine of a slow train coming, a locomotive of doom and retribution, souls wailing in a caboose crowded with the forlorn damned and other people like them.

Recordings of The Beatles' drummer Ringo Starr's first band Rory Storm And The Hurricanes have been discovered, 50 years after they were originally made. The tapes were recorded in March 1960, a full two years before Starr was asked by producer Brian Epstein to join The Beatles.

The Killers have announced a full UK arena tour for this November. The Las Vegas band, who release their fourth studio album Battle Born on September 17, will play 11 shows on the trek. The run of dates begins at Glasgow's SECC on October 26 and runs until November 17 when the band headline the second of two shows at London's O2 Arena. The tour also includes stops in Aberdeen, Birmingham, Nottingham, Newcastle, Cardiff, Sheffield, Liverpool and Manchester.

It's the last day of summer, as Van Dyke Parks tells us, repeatedly. He's right, of course, but it's also true that there are still two days left of End Of The Road, pretty much the last festival of 2012.

One bright morning a couple of weeks ago, I was unpacking CDs in my new house and found Four Tet’s “Pause” as an ideal soundtrack. Eleven years old, it still sounded wonderful: beatific but fleet of foot; contemporary in spite of folktronica, or whatever it was called (the pricelessly daft “Idylltronica” was even better), being a very fleeting fad. I think Kieran Hebden once blamed me for coming up with that folktronica tag; wrongly, I hope.

The Rolling Stones have been booked to play four shows later this year, including two nights at London's O2 Arena, according to US sources. US music industry magazine Billboard quotes a source this morning (August 30) who claims that the band will play four dates in November, two at London's O2 Arena and two at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The source also details that the gigs will be put on by British entrepreneur Richard Branson and Australian promoter Paul Dainty and reports that the band will be paid a cool $25 million (£15.8 million) for the four shows.