This year's London Film Festival opens with a bang: Somali pirates, Navy SEALS and Tom Hanks...

A few weeks ago, an EP turned up from the Rough Trade label, credited to a band called Trans (I’ve included some tracks below). Information was sketchy, at best: among the gnomic statements of intent on the press release, the most concrete were probably “Hard-panned stereo”, “Glasgow left/London right”, “celebrate good times” and, most pointedly, “MESSAGE: OBLIQUE”.

“Life is good,” reflects Mick Fleetwood. We are over two hours into Fleetwood Mac’s third and final show at the O2, and it has fallen to Fleetwood to introduce his fellow bandmates on stage.

Yesterday afternoon, I did something that I should probably, as a curious and more or less responsible music journalist, have done weeks ago: I listened to the debut album by Haim, “Days Are Gone”.

“I am guilty,” says Roy Harper, “of taking you on some strange journeys, I have to admit.” We are two songs into a solo Harper show to mark the release of his first new album in 13 years, taking place in a record shop (Rough Trade East) and being streamed live on the internet; a confluence of events that clearly amuses the singer on some essential and bemused level.

The coverage in last weekend’s broadsheet arts pages of Cormac McCarthy’s new book was puzzling, to say the least: there wasn’t any. As you might expect, there were plenty of reviews of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, which was also released this week – The Times even ran with a preview/review of The Goldfish, Donna Tartt’s first novel in a decade, which isn’t published for another month. But, strangely, the publication of The Counselor by Cormac McCarthy passed by without comment.

I’m not, as a rule, the sort of person who reveres and memorises reviews from the notional golden age of rock journalism. But the other day, I was pondering something Nick Kent wrote in his original NME review of Television’s “Marquee Moon”. I found it online this morning, specifically this passage:

In the next edition of Uncut, out on September 25 in the UK, Alastair McKay recounts a recent trip to Mike Scott’s flat in Dublin. McKay is there to interview Scott for a piece on the making of The Waterboys’ “Fisherman’s Blues”, a wonderful album which, imminently, will be memorialised by a 7CD compilation of its epic sessions, “Fisherman’s Box”.

Yesterday, ahead of the start of the BBC series, The Sound Of Cinema: The Music That Made The Movies, The Telegraph asked their film critics – and then their Twitter followers – to come up with their favourite film soundtracks.

Nicolas Roeg is most widely known for the superlative run of films he made during the 1970s – including Performance, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth and Bad Timing – but as his memoir, The World Is Ever Changing reveals, his interests are many and wide-ranging.