Audience

Phil Colins, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford to attend premiere

Read an interview with the Iron Man actor, and see clips from the film here

The Courteeners are not, as regular readers could probably guess, the sort of band I like much, and I generally try not to let the existence of groups like them bug me. Occasionally, though, I’ll become passingly outraged by something – like, say, the constant and wildly optimistic comparison that keeps being drawn between the Courteeners and The Smiths.

Folk double-header stuns audience into silence

About three songs in to her set, Jana Hunter peers over the rims of her glasses, squints at the audience and asks: "Is there someone here called Neil that I know from Panama?"

I'm just playing an old record by the great folk/psych/raga guitarist Peter Walker, who has recently returned to action after nearly 40 years of, as far as I can tell from a quick circuit round the internet, practising flamenco guitar. Amazingly, Walker - one of the few survivors of John Fahey's generation of American primitives, and the man who provided musical accompaniment to Timothy Leary's early experiments - is playing just down the road from me in Dalston, North-East London tonight.

Both bands perform onstage at intimate Jack Daniels Mash gig

Springsteen and RATM guitarist perform together at two US gigs

I guess it’s become a cliché over the years that, when a Bristol band affiliated to trip-hop make a comeback, they should be somehow darker, and heavier, as if the magisterial doom that they all conjured up from the start somehow wasn’t enough.

A couple of interesting books turned up in this morning’s post. Mark Kozelek sent me his collected lyrics, “Nights Of Passed Over”, which also comes with a CD of live and rare recordings, a nice complement to the excellent Sun Kil Moon album which I blogged about last week.