Dylan? Sinatra? Fly me to the moon!

So much good here this time out, after missing a playlist last week for various reasons. Where to start?

Richmond Fontaine's Willy Vlautin is back with a new band, a female singer and a rich collection of songs...

About ten years ago, I had a series of conversations with some people preparing a new edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Music. Their aim, it seemed, was to take the 84 tracks originally compiled from Smith’s collection of 78s, and subject them to a vigorous digital clean-up. How much better would these songs sound, was their reasoning, if all the grit and static was removed, leaving the performances unsullied and sharp?

I was reminiscing with an old friend over the weekend about The Specials, his favourite band. Our chat brought us to the great 1979 2-Tone Tour that featured The Specials, supported by Madness and The Selecter, a snapshot of which now duly follows.

Damon Albarn is a man of many guises, and it seems he also has an outfit to match them all. In his role as Blur frontman, he consistently favoured Fred Perry tops and oxblood Doc Martens. As a member of Gorillaz, he even went as far as to adopt an entirely different persona – the spiky-haired animated singer 2D (real name: Stuart Tusspot). For The Good, The Bad And The Queen, he favoured a Two Tone-style dark suit and a low top hat, and for his reimagining of the life of Elizabethan mystic John Dee, he went as far as to grow a beard. Tonight, he arrives on stage wearing a simple suit and tie and a pair of desert boots.

Gruff Rhys and Huw Bunford take us through their back catalogue

As Damon Albarn prepares to release his debut solo album, Everyday Robots, on Monday, and 20 years since the release of Parklife is celebrated, we delve back into the Uncut archive (July 2009, Take 146) and go behind the scenes of the sessions that produced Blur’s classic albums and reveal the conflicts that nearly destroyed the band… Interviews: Nick Hasted

Arctic Monkeys, Kate Bush, Warren Zevon and Neil Young all feature in the new issue of Uncut, dated June 2014 and out now.

Next month, Arctic Monkeys play two shows at London’s Finsbury Park to more than 100,000 people, which makes it a reasonable moment to look back at the band’s journey from the Sheffield suburb of High Green to their current all-conquering place in a rock pantheon where they are now comfortably settled as one of the great British bands of the last decade.