Blogs

So music at Glastonbury begins today, after Thursday's rain-soaked warm-up. Thankfully the sun is out, the mud is mostly gone, and the relieved party atmosphere is perfect for Goat at the West Holts Stage.

In among short stories from Annie Proulx, Ed Park and Dashiell Hammett in The New Yorker’s recent “Crimes & Misdemeanours” fiction special was, unexpectedly, new material by Cormac McCarthy.

Last week started on an absolute high when Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s Alchemy tour rocked up to London’s 02 Arena, turbulence in its wake, some of the crowds they had recently played to evidently unhappy with aspects of the band’s current set, notably the long jams around the songs they are playing from last year’s Psychedelic Pill, especially “Walk Like A Giant” and the extended feedback cacophony of its final 10 minutes, which was spectacularly brutal. Audiences in Birmingham and Newcastle had been from all accounts clearly agitated.

Age cannot wither him, nor custom stale his finite variety, though he does seem fractionally more concerned about his trousers falling down these days. The ungodly miracle of Iggy Pop, 66 years old, remains one of the most bizarre and compelling spectacles in rock’n’roll; more bizarre and compelling, perhaps, with every year that goes by.

If, at this late date, you still need proof Neil Young is not a man to be trusted, something akin to that arrives about two and a quarter hours into his show at London’s O2 Arena.

Siouxsie Sioux’s arrival on stage for her first show in nearly five years is announced by a small plume of dry ice that begins to rise from behind the drum kit at precisely 8.50pm.

Lou Reed was back in the news last week and for reasons other than his recent life-saving liver transplant. It turned out that some boorish actor, a self-styled hell-raiser, Rhys Ifans, by name, had thrown a bit of a strop during a newspaper interview and so one of the Saturday broadsheets, presumably stuck for anything else to fill its pages, canvassed some notable journalists about their most difficult celebrity interview.

The appearance of Werner Herzog as the icy criminal mastermind in Tom Cruise’s most recent film, Jack Reacher, may have come as a surprise to those who assumed that the German director wouldn’t have much interest in such conventional film making.

Checking emails over the weekend, I was more than passingly alarmed when I got a message from a friend asking if I’d heard the news about Lou Reed. This sounded somewhat ominous. Lou has looked decidedly frail at recent London shows and he is after all 71 and despite being sober for many years has not always led the kind of lifestyle that could be described as wholly healthy. For a long time, he seemed alongside Keith Richards the rock star most likely to become a casualty of what might euphemistically be described as reckless living. Could the excesses of his past finally have caught up with him?

Getting it together in the suburbs seems to be a peculiarly middle class rite of passage – the moment when city living is no longer tenable and a migration in pursuit of wider spaces, cleaner living and better schools is required. Such considerations are behind the decision taken by Nathaniel and Julia Noailles, who with their young, Aspergersy son Copley exchange their life in Boston for a more spacious existence in Dolores Woods, a large development on the outskirts of an un-named Midwestern city, in Patrick Flanery’s tremendous new novel, Fallen Land.