Blogs

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.

To Los Angeles, then, and last night's Academy Awards. Surprises? Not many, truth be told.

There’s a Youtube clip of Ryuichi Sakamoto, dressed in black hunched over a piano playing the piece of music he is most famous for – “Forbidden Colours”, from the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. It is, I guess, the idea of Sakamoto we’re most familiar with – the artist, his instrument of choice, the music he is playing both delicate and fluid.

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.