Ten years after

I wrote a Throwing Muses feature for the November 2013 issue of Uncut, for which I spoke to all Muses past and present. The key interview, of course, was with Kristin Hersh, which ended up taking place over two lengthy sessions.

Old and new treasures from the folk pioneer...

A 6 CD set of LPs, EPs, Beeb cuts, demos and live...

Paul McCartney has replied to two fans who first contacted him 50 years ago. BBC News reports that McCartney wrote a reply to Barbara Bezant and Lyn Phillips decades after they recorded a message on to tape in 1963 and sent it to the Finsbury Park Astoria in London, where The Beatles were performing live. The tape was later found at a car boot sale with its buyer deciding to try and locate the two women.

A set of 34 unpublished pictures of The Beatles is set to be sold at auction after it was discovered on undeveloped film previously belonging to the band's official photographer.

Mazzy Star are set to release their first new album in 17 years, Seasons Of Your Day. The band's fourth studio album will come out on September 24 and was recorded in California and Norway. Click below to listen to the first single from the album, "California". The album follows 1990's She Hangs Brightly, 1993's So Tonight That I Might See and 1996's Among My Swan.

If, as internet speculation and promo footage imply, “Tomorrow’s Harvest” has a Cold War/atomic age subtext, Boards Of Canada’s focus is, as ever, long-range and aesthetic: less on the actual devastation wrought by nuclear weapons, more on nebulous creep and on the terrible beauty of a mushroom cloud when observed from a relatively safe distance. It’s a potentially glib way of toying with signifiers: Armageddon as nature documentary.

There are many delights on offer in David Bowie – Five Years, the BBC’s terrific new documentary focussing on five critical periods in Bowie’s career. Here’s a longhaired Bowie, sporting a natty fedora, at Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1971, miming being disembowelled. And here he is on The Dick Cavett Show in 1974, wearing a dark blue shirt, tartan tie and brown trousers, twirling a cane while he performs “Footstompin”, a cut that eventually became “Fame”.

Tilda Swinton launched the David Bowie Is exhibition at London's Victoria And Albert Museum last night (March 20). Scroll down to read her after-dinner speech in full. During the address, the actress made mention of the fact that Bowie himself was not in attendance. She said: "I know you aren't here tonight, but somehow, no matter. We are - and you brought us out of the wainscotting like so many freaky old bastards."

It’s easy – and probably useful, sometimes – to lambast major labels for what looks from the outside like chronic short-termism. The climate is, understandably I guess, a neurotic one, and those days are long gone when labels would work long-term with a select group of trophy artists, whose usefulness to the company was more silvery and nebulous, more about cachet than quick profit.