I’m not sure what happens on Saturday towards the end of the first night of Bob Dylan’s three shows at London’s Hammersmith Apollo. Suddenly, though, he’s blazing through one of the songs he traditionally reserves for encores, “All Along The Watchtower”, with no break between it and the roaring version of “Ballad Of A Thin Man” that normally you’d have expected to be the show’s climax, the band then taking a well-deserved bow and a quick break before coming back for one, two or three more songs, further lapping up of the crowd’s applause prior to a final wave goodnight, perhaps even a nod from Bob in the general direction of a crowd he otherwise doesn’t go too far out of his way to acknowledge.

These are, at last, exhilarating times for Bruce Robinson. In the 26 years since his extraordinary debut, Withnail & I, the writer and director has withdrawn almost entirely from films after the grim experiences of his post-Withnail projects.

Among the multitude of underground micro-genres that have grown like bacilli these past few years, one of the most refined is ‘Modern Classical’. Ostensibly, much of the music that is sold under this pretext is a kind of evolved ambience, with compositional pretensions: a tidy hybrid of Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno and Erik Satie that is almost invariably pleasant, but which often seems to affect substance without actually delivering it.

Even in the hinterlands of myth, the notion of sex with snowmen seems rather a neglected subject.

George Clooney’s fourth film as director takes place across a handful of tense days during a primary election in Ohio, where governor Mike Morris (Clooney) is a hair’s-breadth away from securing the Democratic party nomination to stand for office...

As a general rule, I tend to think that my complete lack of musical ability hasn’t been too much of a handicap to a career as a critic. Unburdened by doomed musical projects – or, indeed, talent – it means I can avoid judging the success of artists against any creative failures of my own.

A new Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album often prompts me to visit a remarkable resource called The Royal Stable, a website dedicated to thoroughly cataloguing and cross-referencing this most fiendishly complicated of musical careers.

The press release that comes with Tarwater’s “Inside The Ships” reveals that this is the duo’s 11th album – a slightly alarming number, which suggests I’ve rather lost touch with the band over the past few years. “Inside The Ships”, however, has an instantly and satisfyingly familiar sound, not too different from Tarwater in 1998, when their “Silur” album seemed to be part of a small glut of German records (by The Notwist, To Rococo Rot, Kreidler, Mouse On Mars, Pluramon and so on) that sat in an appealing space halfway between electronica and post-rock.

Looking back at my blog on “Smoke Ring For My Halo”, I started with an Uncut quote from Kurt Vile that is salient here, too. “We recorded a lot of rockers,” he said of “Smoke Ring”, “but they just didn’t seem to fit.”

Before we settled on the “Music That Made Bolan Boogie” CD to go with this month’s issue, we toyed with a compilation of new, glam-influenced music.