Damon Albarn is a man of many guises, and it seems he also has an outfit to match them all. In his role as Blur frontman, he consistently favoured Fred Perry tops and oxblood Doc Martens. As a member of Gorillaz, he even went as far as to adopt an entirely different persona – the spiky-haired animated singer 2D (real name: Stuart Tusspot). For The Good, The Bad And The Queen, he favoured a Two Tone-style dark suit and a low top hat, and for his reimagining of the life of Elizabethan mystic John Dee, he went as far as to grow a beard. Tonight, he arrives on stage wearing a simple suit and tie and a pair of desert boots.

There is something to be said for the shoe-string budget movie. Recent films like Locke (Tom Hardy having a meltdown while travelling in a car from Birmingham to London) proved to be a refreshing and inventive corrective to the seasonal trudge of blockbusters. Blue Ruin is a similarly impressive low-budget affair, showcasing two emergent talents: writer/director Jeremy Saulnier and lead actor Macon Blair.

As Robert Gordon reminds us in Respect Yourself: Stax Records And The Soul Explosion, his terrific account of the rise and fall of the great Memphis soul imprint, the Stax story is more than a record-label history. “It is an American story,” Gordon writes,” where the shoe-shine boy becomes a star, the country hayseed an international magnate. It’s the story of individuals against society, of small business competing with large, of the disenfranchised seeking their own tile in the American mosaic.”

In the opening voiceover for their debut, Blood Simple, the Coen brothers established the methodology that has driven their films ever since: “I don’t care if you’re the pope of Rome, president of the United States, man of the year, something can always go wrong.”

Four years on from the death of his creator Chris Sievey, Frank Sidebottom has finally found the international platform that eluded him during Sievey's lifetime.

Anyone who happened to catch Graham Norton's show on Friday night might have been surprised to see Richard Ayoade sharing the sofa with Kylie Minogue, Russell Crowe and Cameron Diaz: chat show royalty, and Ayoade's presence among them suggests things have turned out very well for the bloke from The IT Crowd.

To be a fan of Gillian Welch, as many Uncut readers will appreciate, requires an uncommon degree of faithfulness and patience. In 18 years, she has released just five albums; given that the gap between the last one (2011’s The Harrow And The Harvest) and its predecessor (2003’s Soul Journey) ran to eight years, a follow-up may still be some way off.

Coogan and Brydon return for more Michael Caine impressions: this time, in the sun...

In an interview in the current issue of Uncut with Willy Vlautin, the singer-songwriter with Richmond Fontaine, discusses his flourishing second career as an author.

A lot of people peak in high school. Eric Love is not one of them. While many other teenagers are in the thick of their glory days, Eric is being starred up – that is, making the transition from a juvenile facility to a maximum security penitentiary, where he is billeted alongside some of the country’s very worst criminals. What follows over the next 100 minutes is as harrowing as you’d perhaps expect for a film that, in the first 10 minutes, sees Eric fashioning a shiv from a toothbrush and Bic razor. No good will come of this.