1 Girls’ Morning Light Never ones to shy away from a hot ticket – even if it’s
probably getting a bit lukewarm by now – we’d like to big up San Fran’s Girls
and their fuzzy, scuzzy surf pop. Morning Light’s out next month, but don’t
fret! You can get it on their studiedly unarsedly titled album Album. Album.
2 L'Homme Du Train People quite
often take the piss out of Johnny Hallyday. And to be fair, he is quite
ridiculous. An ageing lion-faced French rocker (though he's actually Belgian),
who has never made a decent song during a 40-year highly successful career. And
yet his performance as an ageing bank robber in L’Homme Du Train is breathtaking,
exuding charisma. And that's only one part of this superbly paced,
beautiful-looking always ignored film. It's just lovely.
3 Jon Ronson On... Anyone who is
capable of writing amusingly about family life without being twee must be
especially gifted. But it takes longer to warm to Jon Ronson as a broadcaster,
perhaps because of his voice. But his new series has been superb. This week's
interview with a man who invented a wife for an internet forum then killed her
off is cringy, sad and hilarious.
4 Field Music (Measure) The Brewis
Brothers, David and Peter, are well-loved in some muso circles – not commercial
ones, of course, but who wants to see them in expensive clothes? Anyway, after
solo-ish projects School Of Language and The Week That Was, they’re back in
harness with a revamped band and a new album of their strangely lovely Wings-meets-incidental-music
hybrid on 15 February.
5 John Harris’s Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’
Roll Well, this book is as “inventive, untamed and adorable as a John
Squire guitar solo” according to Tony Parsons, who has clearly never heard any
music ever. If the book was plodding, sludgy and derivative (and rare), he
might have a point. Instead it’s a fun font of trivia and anecdote, which you
probably got for Christmas. We did, and we are most diverted.
