Blogs

James Bond at 50 seems in pretty good shape.

Tim Burton's kid friendly Frankenstein opens this year's London Film Festival...

It was National Poetry Day last week, a date I’m sure you found your own ways to celebrate. I was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where John Cooper Clarke was in residence for the evening, headlining a show that also featured appearances by fellow poets Mike Garry and Luke Wright, a couple of sharp young wordsmiths who by the look of them may not have been capable of joined-up writing when Clarke was in his glorious early pomp and may possibly not even have been born then, Wright especially looking like he’s only just stopped being looked after by baby-sitters and cooed over in a crib.

Stoker arrives with some heavy expectations. It is the English language debut of South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, the architect of the nerve-shredding Oldboy.

Neil Young is not, at a guess, an artist who suffers much from writer’s block. In the past few years, many of his albums have felt like spontaneous dispatches from an over-productive mind.

Boxing Day, 1967, and The Beatles’ new film, something called Magical Mystery Tour, is about to be shown for the first time, broadcast by the BBC, fans looking forward to what surely will be a highlight of the Christmas television schedules, a welcome respite to those of a certain age from the usual seasonal fare of old movies and light entertainment, all that stuff that they usually show to keep the old folks happy over the holidays.

I interviewed James Murphy in late 2006, for a preview piece about The Sound Of Silver, the second album by his band, LCD Soundsystem.

It’s a pretty auspicious day, according to my Twitter feed. No, it’s not just that Neil Young has joined Twitter – 21,300 followers and rising.

Emmett Kelly has been making records as The Cairo Gang for a good few years now but, if he’s known at all, chances are it’s for his unusually enduring role in Will Oldham’s band: the amazing Royal Stable site suggests he’s been in on most Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy projects since 2006.

Here’s Jimmy Page, reminiscing about Led Zeppelin’s 2007 reunion show at the 02. “We wanted to go out there, stand up and be counted,” he said at a press conference held earlier today in London. “To show people who maybe didn’t know Led Zeppelin but had heard a lot about us why we were what we were. And not only that, we had had a really good time that night. We made a lot of people very happy.”