Audience

To Los Angeles, then, and last night's Academy Awards. Surprises? Not many, truth be told.

I had the good fortune to interview Jim Jarmusch recently for our An Audience With… feature. As you’d imagine, it was interesting, wide-ranging chat, and inevitably not everything we talked about made it into the magazine. There’s a couple of things in particular that seemed pretty interesting – not least the ‘full’ answer he gave to a question regarding the current status of The Sons Of Lee Marvin, a shadowy cabal whose members – allegedly – include Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Iggy Pop.

“On ‘Sweet Thing’, he asked me to imagine myself as a young, French drummer who was witnessing his first execution,” recalls veteran drummer Tony Newman, recalling the sessions for David Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs in John Robinson’s cover story for this month’s Uncut, which goes on sale this Friday, February 28.

There’s a Youtube clip of Ryuichi Sakamoto, dressed in black hunched over a piano playing the piece of music he is most famous for – “Forbidden Colours”, from the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. It is, I guess, the idea of Sakamoto we’re most familiar with – the artist, his instrument of choice, the music he is playing both delicate and fluid.

UK DVD debut for Right Stuff director Philip Kaufman’s cantankerous anti-western...

Cliff Richard has said that he will not go vegetarian when he supports Morrissey in America later this year. As reported on Thursday (February 13), Morrissey has announced two major US arena shows with support from Sir Tom Jones and Sir Cliff Richard. In a statement, Morrissey said he was "honoured and thrilled" to have Jones and Richard on the bills.

There’s a very good feature in the current Uncut on the making of XTC’s “Making Plans For Nigel”, which reminded me of a time when I was often in their company, usually in far flung corners of the world, far from their Swindon homes, including the following adventure.