Audience

Avatar has much to answer for. Blue-skinned aliens aside, James Cameron’s film was famously heralded (at least by the PR team) as the future of cinema – a digital epic to change the shape of the modern blockbuster.

We’re all still reeling from the shocking news of Lou Reed’s death on Sunday. Reading through the tributes that have poured in over the last few days, the one that’s resonated most with me came from John Cale, who in his wise and moving testimonial to his old sparring partner, wrote: “we have the best of our fury laid out on vinyl, for the world to catch a glimpse”. We’ll be running out own full tribute to Lou in a future issue of Uncut.

Kevin Shields is set to answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular Audience With… feature. So is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask the legendary leader of My Bloody Valentine? How many pedals does he own? Would he ever consider making an acoustic record? Just when can we expect another new album? Send up your questions by 5pm GMT, Monday, October 28 to uncutaudiencewith@ipcmedia.com.

As you may have seen, this week’s NME features the 2013 edition of their 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. For this one, they also accepted votes from a bunch of the mag’s alumni, including me, so I thought it’d be an easy, albeit self-indulgent, blog to reproduce my Top 50 albums here.

To Hammersmith, and the launch of The Who’s super deluxe edition of Tommy at Riverside Studios. Tonight, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey are attending a special screening of Sensation – The Story Of The Who’s Tommy, a new documentary about the album due for broadcast this Friday [October 25].

Arctic Monkeys kicked off the first night of their UK tour last night at Newcastle's Metro Radio Arena. Supported by The Strypes, the band played to a sellout crowd, kicking off with the first single from their fifth and most recent studio album, 'AM', 'Do I Wanna Know?', before a set which mixed new tracks such as 'Why’d You Only Call Me When You're High?' with classic hits from their repertoire including 'Fluorescent Adolescent', 'Mardy Bum' and 'Dancing Shoes'.

In his excellent Uncut review of the Morrissey “Autobiography”, Michael alludes to the get-out clause afforded rock memoirists post-“Chronicles”: why bother obfuscating certain awkward details when you can, by being capricious with time and chronology, just skip the difficult stuff?

Playing spot-the-reference isn’t, I guess, the most elevated game for critics to indulge in. White Denim’s music, however, suggests that the Austin quartet are conceivably America’s most exciting record store nerds. Last time they put an album out (“D”, in 2011), I wrote a review in the mag that included this paragraph:

There are two attempts early on to get the audience to sing along: one works, one doesn’t. During “Military Madness”, Graham Nash tries unsuccessfully to encourage the audience to join in on his chant of “No more war”. A little while later, however, he’s got the entire Albert Hall singing cheerfully with him on “Our House”, which even leads to the first standing ovation of the night.

Lloyd Cole is set to answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular Audience With… feature. So is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask the legendary singer songwriter? Does he still favour cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin? How on earth did he end up recording an album with Krautrock supremo, Hans-Joaquim Roedelius? What's his current golf handicap?