Police

Judge makes decision after preliminary hearing

Lots of goodness to start the year today, not least the new Low and Eternal Tapestry albums. Thanks, too, to David M, who tipped me off yesterday about an Oakland duo called Date Palms. Playing their Myspace right now and feeling it very much indeed.

Happy new year: I trust everyone had some kind of decent break. I read Robert Byron on Tibet (for climatic context, possibly), watched Robinson In Ruins, played a fair bit of Pharoah Sanders and The Watersons, and rediscovered that a body clock wrecked by parenthood can be very useful during an Ashes series.

Police raid his boat in New Zealand

With the new issue onsale, Top 50 of the year inside and all, plus the whole Uncut Music Award business, it occurs to me I should hunker down and prepare a Wild Mercury Sound 2010 chart.

Some next-level spam last night, in that someone/some bot tried posting, “I can't believe LeBron is going to the Bulls, he should really just stay where he is” on an old Elliott Smith blog. For what it’s worth, I can’t believe Notts have signed Ben Phillips this morning, either.

Thanks for all your comments to last week’s purgative 2010 disappointments thread. Now we’ve got that our of our systems, this week’s playlist features plenty of 2011 releases, as you can see.

Prints were due to be auctioned

The line-up for this year’s London Film Festival has now been announced - which means it’s time for me to give you a quick heads-up on some of the films we’re most looking forward to seeing during the festival. Apart from the new Mike Leigh and other festival die-hards, there’s plenty of promising stuff – docs on Lemmy, Mott the Hoople and Creation records plus Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, Patrick Keiller’s Robinson In Ruins and Anton Corbijn’s The American.

Organiser Melvin Benn says he'll pull the plug if the band overrun