Last year, I interviewed the film director Peter Strickland about Berberian Sound Studio, his tribute to the Heath Robinson-style endeavours of analogue sound designers. Strickland and I chatted about the influences for his main character, a tweedy sound engineer called Gilderoy; Strickland mentioned pioneering figures like Adam Bohman, Vernon Elliott and Basil Kirchin.

There’s a scene in Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country For Old Men, where sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his deputy arrive at the site of a particularly grisly murder. “It’s a mess, ain’t it sheriff?” asks the deputy. Surveying the corpses and the wreck of a burned out SUV, Bell replies, “If it ain’t, it’ll do till a mess gets here.”

Celebrating anniversaries has, I guess, become second nature in the music industry now. A quick pass through the reviews pages in the last couple of issues of Uncut reveal anniversary reissues and special editions for Nirvana, Billy Bragg, Tears For Fears, R.E.M, Four Tet and Bob Marley.

A lot of things can happen when you watch The Necks, the magnificent Australian improvising trio, play live. Sometimes, you can become fixated on prosaic details: how does Tony Buck’s left hand keep vibrating that shaker onto his drumkit at such an ecstatic velocity for so long, for instance? Do they have hidden clocks that allow them to move so elegantly to a conclusion without appearing to even acknowledge each other’s presence, let alone look at one another? Will unzipping my coat be an unacceptably noisy intervention?

Avatar has much to answer for. Blue-skinned aliens aside, James Cameron’s film was famously heralded (at least by the PR team) as the future of cinema – a digital epic to change the shape of the modern blockbuster.

In his excellent Uncut review of the Morrissey “Autobiography”, Michael alludes to the get-out clause afforded rock memoirists post-“Chronicles”: why bother obfuscating certain awkward details when you can, by being capricious with time and chronology, just skip the difficult stuff?

Without giving too much away here, one of the main characters in Wes Anderson’s new film works in a patisserie.

There are many revelations in Morrissey’s Autobiography, but perhaps the most unexpected arrives on page 194. “While in Denver,” writes Morrissey, “Johnny [Marr] and I attend a concert by A-ha, whom we have met previously and whom we quite like.”

Playing spot-the-reference isn’t, I guess, the most elevated game for critics to indulge in. White Denim’s music, however, suggests that the Austin quartet are conceivably America’s most exciting record store nerds. Last time they put an album out (“D”, in 2011), I wrote a review in the mag that included this paragraph:

There are two attempts early on to get the audience to sing along: one works, one doesn’t. During “Military Madness”, Graham Nash tries unsuccessfully to encourage the audience to join in on his chant of “No more war”. A little while later, however, he’s got the entire Albert Hall singing cheerfully with him on “Our House”, which even leads to the first standing ovation of the night.