The week’s gone by at such a clip, we’re nearly at the end of it and I still haven’t, I’ve just realised, written about this show, which was frankly too good to let pass without comment, however belated.

I was looking through an old Red House Painters file a while back, and came across a review of their debut album in which Allan compared Mark Kozelek’s songwriting to that of Dino Valente.

The sticker on the front of my promo of Superpitcher’s second album describes Aksel Schaufler as “Cologne’s melancholy techno-pop maestro”. It has been about six years since the first Superpitcher album, but Schaufler’s worldview doesn’t appear to have improved much. If Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor sometimes comes across as an indie boy lost on the dancefloor, Schaufler’s persona is akin to a sociopath on the verge of a panic attack.

The first thing you would have noticed arriving in Hyde Park last Frday to see Pearl Jam is how many more people there appear to be than were here for last year’s Hard Rock Calling weekend, the size of the crowd, a hint of mob surliness and the press of people at the front of the stage something of a concern later for a visibly worried Eddie Vedder. It’s almost 10 years to the day, after all, since nine Pearl Jam fans were crushed to death during the band’s performance on June 30, 2000, at the Rosskilde festival, over there in Denmark. No wonder at one point he looks so rattled.

The last time we saw Paul McCartney on stage at Hyde Park was a year and a day ago. Then, he joined Neil Young for a coruscating version of “A Day In The Life”, sharing vocals with Neil and helping coax waves of feedback from Old Black. It was a major highlight during a tremendous run of shows last summer at Hyde Park that also included Bruce Springsteen and Blur.

When Ryan Sambol, who frankly looks like he hasn’t slept since beds were invented, asks if we want to hear another new song the only people in a packed Borderline who perhaps aren’t sure they do at this particular point are his band, Austin’s The Strange Boys.

Some correspondence over the past week or so regarding The Alps, whose new album I must admit I’m yet to hear: the last one was pretty cool, something like a kind of psychedelicised Air, if I remember right.

Among the many highlights of Robert Plant & Alison Krauss’ “Raising Sand”, I kept coming back to their take on Gene Clark’s “Polly Come Home”. Had they, and I guess their producer T-Bone Burnett, captured the uncanny gravity of Low on purpose, or by some equally uncanny accident?

In one of those funny little coincidences that come along every now and then, I’ve just finished reading the film pages in the next issue. Among them is a very fine review of Francis Ford Coppola’s latest, Tetro. And now, I’ve just watched the trailer for Somewhere, the forthcoming film from Sofia Coppola.

In some circles, it’ll be construed as heretical behaviour: James Blackshaw not touching an acoustic guitar for the duration of an entire album, favouring instead a 12-string electric. For someone who’s been proclaimed, not infrequently here, as some kind of saviour of folk guitar or whatever, it’s something of a shock.