Quite a bit of activity on yesterday’s Dylan blog, as you might expect. Interesting, though, that most of the talk seems to not be about the music, but about SonyBMG’s marketing strategy for “Tell Tale Signs” – chiefly the high price being asked for the 3CD set which, as I pointed out, is certainly worth having.

Caleb and Nathan on recording their highly anticipated fourth LP

Around the time, I think, his “Eureka” album came out, I interviewed Jim O’Rourke. It was O’Rourke’s most conventional, song-based album to date, but he still had the musical outlook of an improvising musician. He wouldn’t be touring the album, he told me, because he never wanted to play the same thing more than once. Even a radically rearranged version of a song would be in a way dishonest, he thought. The best way for an insatiable creative force like O’Rourke to make music, it transpired, was to start with a totally clean sheet every single time he picked up an instrument.

A news story in my inbox the other day reminded me that I still hadn’t blogged on the El Guincho record, the one I’ve been alluding to on playlist blogs for a while now. I say “a while”, though in truth I was heinously late hitching up to this particular bandwagon, since most go-getting bloggers were onto “Alegranza” sometime last year, when it was first released in Spain.

Saturday evening at the last and finest mini-festival of late summer, and Minnesota’s most rock’n’roll Mormons can no longer turn the other cheek. Grinding to a halt between glacially slow riffs, LOW guitarist Alan Sparhawk makes an extraordinary appeal for audience sympathy.

Turning up at the SonyBMG HQ in London last week to review the new AC/DC album for Uncut, it occurred to me: what on earth am I going to write? I’d heard and blogged already about “Rock’n’Roll Train” and – not for the first time in anticipation of a new AC/DC album – knew what to expect. The challenge would be how to spend 700 words saying little more than, “It sounds the same as all the others, and it’s great.” As it turned out, though, I rather wish now that I’d had that problem.

I’m chatting to Kurt Wagner, who I’ve just bumped into at the back of The Borderline and because I haven’t seen him for years, I’m gabbing away and don’t realise that I’ve actually interrupted him on his way to the stage for his headlining appearance at another great Club Uncut night.

Very nice Club Uncut last night, headlined by Kurt Wagner. Allan will be blogging about Wagner’s lovely set later, I think, though I have to mention that: a) the “OH (Ohio)” songs that made up virtually the entire set stood up great to solo treatment; b) his guitar playing, all languid southern soul licks, seems much improved than I can recall from long-ago solo shows; and c) in the event that modesty prevents Allan from reporting this, he gave thanks and provoked applause for our editor. So he can come back.

Very nice Club Uncut last night, headlined by Kurt Wagner. Allan will be blogging about Wagner’s lovely set later, I think, though I have to mention that: a) the “OH (Ohio)” songs that made up virtually the entire set stood up great to solo treatment; b) his guitar playing, all languid southern soul licks, seems much improved than I can recall from long-ago solo shows; and c) in the event that modesty prevents Allan from reporting this, he gave thanks and provoked applause for our editor. So he can come back.

Washed up fighters make great movie characters. Think of Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, Marlon Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” speech in On the Waterfront, Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby and Stacy Keach, pissing blood in John Huston’s underrated Fat City. Add to their ranks Randy “The Ram” Robinson, played here by Mickey Rourke in the role that's justifiably attracting much talk of an Oscar.