A quick look at the ever-reliable Wikipedia suggests it’s been seven years since the last Cornershop album was released; so long, in fact, that the Wiiija label still existed to release it. Around the time of “Handcream For A Generation”, I spent a night with Tjinder and Ben in Madrid, coming back to write a feature for Uncut that, if memory serves, basically argued that this album should do every bit as well as the “Brimful Of Asha”-driven “When I Was Born For The Seventh Time”.

I suspect I may have written more about Wild Beasts than any other British band in the two or so years Wild Mercury Sound has been running, doubtless to the bafflement and irritation of a good few regular readers.

Sad to report that David Carradine died yesterday. The star, of course, of Kung Fu, The Long Riders, Boxcar Bertha and Kill Bill, he was an old-school UNCUT hero. As a tribute, here's some extracts from an interview Damien Love conducted with Carradine in December 2003, ahead of his appearance in Kill Bill Vol 2. It's great stuff - some yarns about teaching Dylan kung-fu, buying cars with Scorsese and an incident involving a dog and a very delicate body part...

Somewhat belatedly, I’ve just got round to reading Alex Ross’ fantastic book on 20th Century composition, The Rest Is Noise. A lot to talk about in there, but one quote stuck out yesterday. “Back in 1915,” Ross writes, “the critic Van Wyck Brooks had complained that America was caught in a false dichotomy between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’, between ‘academic pedantry and pavement slang’. He called for a middle-ground culture that would fuse intellectual substance with communicative power.”

When I was grappling with the Dirty Projectors’ “Bitte Orca” a while back, I came to the fairly trite conclusion that I liked the band best when Angel Deradoorian or Amber Coffman took the lead, rather than David Longstreth.

Some talk on the last couple of blogs (Wavves and Playlist 20) about the Ducktails record and Matthew Mondanile’s various other products, so today seems a good time to tackle his stuff properly – not least because I think he may be playing London over the weekend.

The last time I saw Simone Felice anywhere near a London stage, he was hanging above it, wild-eyed and shirtless, from a monitor in the ceiling of the 100 Club, from which precarious position he was leading a boisterous crowd through a rowdy version of a song called “Ruby Mae” from the recently-released new album by The Felice Brothers, who were at the time roaring towards the climax of a typically rambunctious show.

I think I may be one of the last bloggers in the world to get round to writing about Wavves, who became something of a ubiquitous presence a few months ago when “Wavvves” first surfaced.

I’m not sure who compiled “Archive From 1959 – The Billy Childish Story”, reducing something like 100 albums’-worth of material down to 51 tracks, but I suspect it may not have been Childish himself.

MADNESS/WHITE DENIM/EVAN DANDO - Various venues, Shoreditch, 21/5/09 “Thanks for coming to see a washed-up Eighties pop band,” deadpans Suggs as MADNESS take the stage. We’re in The Light Bar, a 300 capacity venue on Norton Folgate, a thin stretch of street that separates Shoreditch from the City. The band are here to celebrate their new album, The Liberty Of Norton Folgate, which is currently sitting at No 5 in the midweek album charts. Not bad, certainly, for a washed-up Eighties pop band.