From humble ivory-tickler to global sensation - the singer-songwriter's rise chronicled...

Hi there. I hope you all had good weekends. Were you, like me, glued to the BBC for the duration of the athletics?

John Murry first entered Uncut airspace in 2006 with World Without End, the bleakly brilliant album of country death songs he wrote and recorded with Bob Frank. Six years on, Murry has just released his first solo album, The Graceless Age, an album of almost symphonic emotional turmoil, co-produced by late American Music Club drummer Tim Mooney. The songs on the record deal sometimes explicitly with Murry’s heroin addiction, specifically the 10-minute ‘Little Coloured Balloons’, a harrowing account of a near-fatal OD. I reviewed The Graceless Age for the current issue of Uncut and emailed Murry some questions, to which he replied in detail and at illuminating length, as you will see from the fascinating transcript that follows.

Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips answers your questions in An Audience With… in this month's new issue of Uncut, out now. In this week's archive feature we head back to our June 2008 issue (Take 133), to find the band's frontman looking back over their back catalogue, taking in Vaseline, drug addiction, union picket lines, the religious right and nothing short of the collapse of civilisation. “My agenda is to go somewhere where we’ve never been before…" Interview: Jaan Uhelszki –––––––––––––––––––––––––

Bjork and legendary broadcaster David Attenborough have teamed up for a music documentary. Attenborough And Bjork: The Nature Of Music looks at the evolution of music, our relationship with music and how technology could impact this relationship in the future. Directed by Louise Hooper, the film is set to be broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK, reports Hollywood Reporter.

Blur played two intimate gigs at London's Maida Vale Studios yesterday (July 31) and aired a number of rare tracks. The four-piece, who recently broadcast their two new songs, "Under The Westway" and "The Puritan" from a secret UK location via a live video stream performance on Twitter, first performed an intimate session for BBC Radio 6Music, which you can see at the bottom of the page.

I don’t have any more information on the new Bob Dylan album, Tempest, following last week’s newsletter and blog on Friday confirming the track listing, so apologies to all the readers who have written in, hungry for further details about the record. The absence of anything further I can tell you at the moment about Tempest gives me, however, the opportunity to briefly sing the praises of Lawless, the new movie from director John Hillcoat and Nick Cave, who’s written the screenplay, as he did for The Proposition, Hillcoat’s savage outback Western.

Singer Tony Martin has died at the age of 98. The legendary crooner, who was best known for his hit singles "I Get Ideas", "Begin The Beguine" and "There's No Tomorrow", passed away on Friday (July 27) from natural causes at his home in West Los Angeles, reports Reuters. Martin, who enjoyed the most successful periods of his career in the 1930s and 1950s, was a contemporary of the likes of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and sold over one million copies of his most successful single "To Each His Own".

Joe Strummer would have been 60 this month, but imagine him for a moment the way I remember him at 20.

Remastered, if not remade or remodelled: Roxy’s radical motherlode...