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You catch us on a pretty busy day, deadlines fast approaching for our last issue of 2012. That’s the one, of course, that traditionally carries our end-of-year lists of best albums, reissues, films, DVDs and books. This means we’ve all been recently asked to nominate our personal Top 20s, from which John has been compiling the definitive countdown, the full list to be published when he’s finished his painstaking calculations in the Uncut that comes out at the end of November.

In 2009, Uncut spoke to The Wire’s creator David Simon, shortly before the broadcast of his follow-up series, Treme. The show was set during the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, a city that Simon felt had effectively been abandoned by the rest of America since the storm. “The only thing that brought this city back was the people who understand its unique culture and who participate in that culture refused to give that up,” he told us.

Neil Young is not, at a guess, an artist who suffers much from writer’s block. In the past few years, many of his albums have felt like spontaneous dispatches from an over-productive mind.

It’s a pretty auspicious day, according to my Twitter feed. No, it’s not just that Neil Young has joined Twitter – 21,300 followers and rising.

Class of '09 grads think bigger; wilder.

Calexico’s new album, Algiers, is reviewed in the current issue of Uncut (October 2012, Take 185) – so we thought we’d take a trip back to April 2003 (Take 71), when Uncut’s John Mulvey flew out to Tucson, Arizona to discover more about the duo’s redrawing of the alt.country map. __________________________

Given today's news about the Led Zeppelin DVD, it occurred to me that this might be worth putting online: my review of the 2007 show...

The once-troubled singer returns. Has she finally got her shit together?

OK I’m going to try and be relatively brief with this – or at least as brief as one can hope to be when dealing with the longest studio album that Neil Young’s ever made. I’ve written what I hope is an exhaustive review of “Psychedelic Pill” for the next issue of Uncut, and don’t really want to repeat myself too much.

Bob Dylan’s fantastic new album opens with a train song. Given the wrath to come and the often elemental ire that accompanies it, not to mention all the bloodshed, madness, death, chaos and assorted disasters that will shortly be forthcoming, you may be surprised that what’s clattering along the tracks here isn’t the ominous engine of a slow train coming, a locomotive of doom and retribution, souls wailing in a caboose crowded with the forlorn damned and other people like them.