Wonder stuff

Final installment of Uncut's exclusive Tell Tale Signs online series!

Read the extended transcript of Mason Ruffner's interview here

Inspiring three volume survey of some of the greatest music ever made

Part 4 of Uncut's Tell Tale Signs special

Best in nearly a decade from newly-trimmed Nashville collective

Psych-pop faerie kings fire up the randomiser

In the next few months, Domino are planning a big reissue series of the Robert Wyatt back catalogue, and the arrival of the first batch the other week compelled me to dust down this interview transcript from the summer of 2007. I visited Wyatt at home in Louth, a little before the marvellous “Comicopera” was released. An edited version of the interview appeared in Uncut last year but, if you’ll excuse my indulgence, I thought the whole thing was worth putting out there. An incredible man, I think.

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.

Quite a bit of activity on yesterday’s Dylan blog, as you might expect. Interesting, though, that most of the talk seems to not be about the music, but about SonyBMG’s marketing strategy for “Tell Tale Signs” – chiefly the high price being asked for the 3CD set which, as I pointed out, is certainly worth having.

Over the weekend, I watched one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen in an age. “Wild Combination” is subtitled “A Portrait Of Arthur Russell”, and I can only defer to The New Yorker for a start, who noted about the film, “This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa, Iowa, playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary.”