Blogs

This year’s Great Escape Festival in Brighton is almost upon us, running from May 10-12 at a 30 venues across the town and featuring somewhere in the region of 300 new artists.

The reggae singer, given the rock doc treatment...

Alex Chilton’s wild, idiosyncratic life after Big Star is examined in the new issue of Uncut (Take 180, May 2012), out now. But what happened before the demise of Chilton’s greatest group? They should have been rock superstars, but Rob Jovanovic explains how drugs, in-fighting and personal tragedy meant Big Star had to settle for being the biggest cult band of all time (from Uncut's Take 94, March 2005). ________________________________

The more-than-extensive ‘Immersion’ edition of Pink Floyd’s opus The Wall (the box includes a scarf and marbles!) is reviewed in our latest issue, out now – so we thought we’d revisit John Lewis’ excellent feature from June 2011 (Take 169). As the extravaganza arrives in Europe, Uncut meets the obsessive fans, stoners, bloggers and military advisors who’ll follow Waters and his lavish production to the ends of the globe…

Three weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be in New York interviewing Jack White for what will be Uncut’s next cover story. The trip took in White’s unveiling of his two new bands on Saturday Night Live (you can watch the performances here) and a couple of pretty intense one-on-ones, the first of which became a fairly epic grapple of sorts.

An amazing vernal equinox morning here in London, and a fine walk through the city: down St John Street, into Smithfield, past St Paul’s and the rat-run of old streets down to the river, and over the Millennium Bridge.

The groaning noise behind me is coming from shelves that have recently started to buckle from the almost daily addition to them of new music books, the majority of them typified by their common bulk, a shared enormity of pages, as if no band’s career can be documented in less pages than might otherwise be devoted to the history of mankind itself, from the beginning, with footnotes, anecdotal asides and a brief biography of everyone who’s ever lived.

The announcement came at the very end of last week that the novelist Alan Garner has written the third instalment of a story he began in 1960 with The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen. To anyone raised in the Seventies like me, the news might have prompted a sudden, sharp reconnection with their childhood; The Weirdstone, and its 1963 sequel The Moon Of Gomrath, were touchstones of my adolescent reading.

As guitarist Lee Ranaldo is in Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes in this month's new issue (April 2012, Take 179), we thought we'd share a Sonic Youth piece from our archive. In this feature, published in 2009, Marc Spitz finds the band (who've just finished what we now know could be their final album, The Eternal) ageing with more dignity than most, but still finding time to lash out at Oasis, Madonna and U2, and order a baby pig with a donut in its mouth… Picture by Pieter M Van Hattem.

News from Phil King on the Jesus And Mary Chain tour in Texas, yesterday, that Ty Segall was due to support them at a show. A pretty cool gig, one would imagine, and a useful prompt to remind me to write something about the latest release from Segall, especially since he’s promising – and it would be rash to disbelieve him, given his fecundity in the past two or three years – another couple of albums in the next few months.