White lies

Click on the links for Part One, Part Two and Part Three of the interview. Is it fair to see the last three LPs of a piece? They seem to sit together as a sequence. Yeah I think what I found, funnily enough, is sometimes you get what you want when you stop trying to get it.

The watercooler moments of the Reading Festival. If there was a watercooler, and not just a lot of beer

One of my favourite pieces of music, especially on bright mornings like today, is “A Rainbow In Curved Air” by Terry Riley, a great fluttering organ-led salute to the sun that put a psychedelic spin on the new classical/electronic/minimalist music that came to the fore in the ‘60s.

Welcome to Waitsville. A place where bad jokes are good, Vaudeville never died, and the talk is of smoking monkeys, weasels and the mating habits of the preying mantis.

Batman: back in the black

There’s a line in The Hold Steady’s “Slapped Actress” that seems more apposite than ever right now. It’s the point where Craig Finn sings, “Some nights it’s entertainment and some other nights it’s just work,” though this afternoon, some might say significantly, he doesn’t actually sing the word “work”. We are watching the Hold Steady play in the sort of environment that, surely, must test even their unquenchable faith in the redemptive power of rock’n’roll and so on.

A welcome - but patchy - portrait of Arthur Lee and his psych-pop alchemists

Cover versions galore from Newman’s fledgling years

Uncut's track-by-track guide to the Hollywood star's debut LP

Earlier, I’d been telling someone that when I saw Pete Doherty at a small Soho club called Jazz After Dark, back in January 2006, it had occurred to me, no doubt somewhat fancifully, that this was to some perhaps small but nevertheless vital extent what it might have been like to see the fledgling Dylan in some bar in Greenwich Village, when the 60s were still young.