It seems as if a month doesn’t go by without the release of a new Ben Wheatley film. I'm exaggerating, of course, but Wheatley is certainly becoming one of Britain’s most prolific film makers, with four full-length features since 2009 – as well as two series of Johnny Vegas’ sitcom, Ideal – under his belt.
Another week, another new issue to plug: after last week’s launch of our Nick Cave Ultimate Music Guide, I should flag up that this month’s Uncut goes on sale in the UK tomorrow, featuring Boards Of Canada, The Source Family, Mississippi Records, These New Puritans, Mark Kozelek, Thee Oh Sees and the “Origins Of American Primitive Guitar” alongside the marquee names.
Keith Richards has admitted he owes library fines going back 50 years.
Richard told The Sun that hanging out by the bookshelves was one of his favourite pastimes as a teenager. "It was a place where you get a hint there was a place called civilization," he said of the library in Dartford, Kent. "I still owe fines from about 50 years ago."
According to the newspaper, the cost could be as much as £20,000.
Parliament and Funkadelic mastermind George Clinton lets us into his P-Funk world in the new issue of Uncut (dated July 2013 and out on Thursday, May 23).
Trevor Bolder has died at the age of 62. He passed away from cancer yesterday (May 21), according to reports. He had been suffering from the disease for four years.
Bolder joined David Bowie's backing band in 1971, playing on four of Bowie's key early Seventies albums - Hunky Dory, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups alongside guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Woody Woodmansey.
I would have bought the issue of Melody Maker in which I first read about Bruce Springsteen on my way into the art school in Newport, where in March 1973 I was in my last term, only a few months away from moving to London and not long after that fetching up on MM as a junior reporter/feature writer, a turn of events that was wholly unexpected and still seems somewhat unreal. Anyway, that was all to come. That Thursday morning, as ever in those days, I picked up a copy of MM at the paper shop at the top of Stow Hill, then eagerly devoured it on the bus into town.
ARE WE ROLLING?
Before meeting him for the first time recently for the feature in this month's issue, I read a lot of interviews with Tame Impala's Kevin Parker in which he was variously cast as a brooding outsider, a sullen introvert, generally moody, an outcast, someone on the edge of things, inclined to solitary misery.
A couple of months ago, I was staying with an old friend, whose teenage daughter was heading out to an ‘80s movie all-nighter. Before she went, she listed what they were going to watch; Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – the kind of John Hughes films that are now routinely used as exemplars of that decade. Her father and I were talking, and we realised we hadn’t actually seen any of them.
