end of the road

The announcement by The Damned that they'll be playing the London Forum in April to celebrate Captain Sensible's 60th birthday and tickets for it will cost what they would have in 1977 has caused a lot of excitement among the band's venerabe fans and reminded me of the following mad escapade from that lively year.

UK DVD debut for Right Stuff director Philip Kaufman’s cantankerous anti-western...

Don Henley has covered Jackson Browne's "These Days" for a forthcoming 2-CD album, Looking Into You: A Tribute To Jackson Browne. The album features versions of Browne’s songs by artists including Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa, Lyle Lovett, Lucinda Williams, Bonnie Raitt and JD Souther. “It is astounding to think that Jackson wrote ‘These Days’ when he was only 16 years old,” Henley said. “But then, he was always a step ahead of the rest of us. I’ve learned a lot from him, over the years, and am honored to be part of this album.”

The Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench is about to release a solo album, You Should Be So Lucky, produced by the legendary Glyn Johns. In this star-studded archive piece from Uncut’s December 2011 issue (Take 175), Johns takes us through producing and engineering The Beatles, the Stones, The Who, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and more – not a bad CV, you could say… Interview: Graeme Thomson

Radiohead have launched a new app called PolyFauna. Writing about the app at Radiohead.com, Thom Yorke explained it as "an experimental collaboration between us (Radiohead) & Universal Everything, born out of The King of Limbs sessions and using the imagery and the sounds from the song 'Bloom'. It comes from an interest in early computer life-experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious."

There’s a very good feature in the current Uncut on the making of XTC’s “Making Plans For Nigel”, which reminded me of a time when I was often in their company, usually in far flung corners of the world, far from their Swindon homes, including the following adventure.

Something like two decades ago, when I was Features Editor of NME and making some pragmatic decisions involving coverage of second and third-tier Britpop bands, I had a kind of argument with Laurence Bell, the owner of the Domino label.

Bill Callahan plays London’s Royal Festival Hall tonight (February 7), in support of his Dream River album (and its recent dub remix, Have Fun With God) – so it seems a good time to skip back to our 197th issue, in which Uncut spends an intimate evening at Callahan’s house in Austin, unpicking the mysteries of the Artist Formerly Known As Smog... “I left clues?” Words: Jaan Uhelszki ________________

This week’s excuse for briskness is I have a longish review of Real Estate to write for the mag, but some good news in here: not least the appearance of a mighty stash of Fela Kuti albums on Bandcamp and some predictably weird mixtapes, compiled by John Fahey, fetching up on Soundcloud.

Charlie Watts has said the Rolling Stones are too old to embark on a lengthy touring schedule. Watts spoke to The Australian ahead of the band's live shows in Perth, Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne next month. Talking about the short tours the band have ventured on in recent years, Watts said the prospect of playing a large number of shows was "daunting" at his "tender age."