Blogs

There’s a feature in the new issue of Uncut by Andy Gill on the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, where he gets to see a couple of extended shows in Cleveland, and I can’t recall the last time I felt so jealous of one of our writers.

Don’t spread it about, but, yes, I’ve heard the new Dylan album. And four or five tracks in, what I was thinking was: how much better is this thing going to get?

One encouraging thread in movies this year has been the return of filmmakers of a Nineties vintage. Wes Anderson, Whit Stillman and Todd Solondz have all returned, successfully, from their various sabbaticals. Potentially topping them all, we now have sight of the imminent return of Paul Thomas Anderson, with his first film since 2007's There Will Be Blood, called The Master.

Coming into work on the bus this morning, it occurred to me that the Christopher Nolan film I most wanted to watch again was Insomnia. I remember it being the least tricksy of Nolan’s films; a sharp, intelligent thriller, heavy on style and atmosphere, which seemed less concerned with the kind of ingenious puzzles and narrative twists that the director deployed in Memento, The Prestige and Inception.

Last night [July 16], the BBC pulled a documentary about last summer’s riots just hours before transmission after a court ruling prevented it from being broadcast. It’s foolish, of course, to speculate who initiated proceedings and for what purpose - although at the risk of sounding paranoid, you suspect there’s plenty of people who’d rather not have such pesky reminders of the riots on our screens in the run up to the Olympics.

Twenty years of touring and recording, of inspiration and graft for moderate acclaim, and it comes down to this. Mark Kozelek, the pivot of first Red House Painters and now Sun Kil Moon, is engaged in one more slog around Europe. It is not going well.

Today, as you may have heard, is apparently the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first gig.

With the death of Ernest Borgnine, aged 95, it feels like yet another precious link back to a golden era of Hollywood film making has gone.

There’s a batch number of high-profile music documentaries out this year – Kevin Macdonald’s Marley and Joe Berliner’s Paul Simon films have already arrived, with the Rolling Stones, the Stone Roses and Fillmore East projects yet to come. But truffle a little deeper and you’ll find some less well-known but equally rich stories deserving attention.

When Bob Dylan played Hop Farm in 2010, it was the hottest weekend of the year and there seemed to be more people at the festival than the site could hold. There were queues for everything and queues to join those queues were not uncommon. By early afternoon, you could barely move for the people already there and the constant stream of new arrivals who added to an already considerable mass.