Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2026 i UNCUT

“I can feel the earth begin to move/I hear my needle hit the groove” IT is February 2001 and I’m in a marquee up on the old railway arches in Bishopsgate for the NME Awards. U2 and Coldplay are among those who have made their way to this as-yet-ungentrified part of East London for beer and canapés. But for reasons lost to time, I end up hosting an impromptu after-party at my flat – about five minutes away near Brick Lane – with Mani and Kevin Shields. After a long evening, we’re all significantly worse for wear and Mani keeps playing Jon Carter’s version of “I Am The Resurrection” from the recent Stone Roses remix album at deafening volume on my stereo. In the distance, I can hear a loud,…

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The title makes it pretty clear, but what was the impetus for this new album? A lot of crazy stuff’s been going on in America with this current president. Insanity, chaos and confusion. There was a period of time recently when he had just gotten into office and it seemed like every day there was some weird thing he’d done or said and it was just pervasive. I was getting so frustrated with the state of things that I started writing about it to help process it, because that’s what songwriting is good for. How has your songwriting process changed since you had a stroke? It’s affected it to some degree as obviously I’m not on the guitar working a melody out. I can make enough of a chord to…

Can you explain a little about the concept that ties the album together – the Dude visiting the dystopian fairground? The fairground at the end of the world as it descends into war and chaos. Having fun as everything cracks up. The Dude is pretty much Jerry Cornelius, a figure who represents esents the absurdism of world politics, prefiguring what Thatcher and Reagan began, and which I believe is ending with Trump and co. What music were e you inspired by on this album? It seems like your own twist on glam rock… I didn’t listen to most glam rock. I liked The Beatles, The Kinks, Hendrix, Dylan, The Who and others who were producing new ideas and adult concepts in rock’n’roll, just as we were doing in New Worlds…

A FEW hours into our time with Bill Callahan, near the peak of Mount Bonnell in his adopted hometown of Austin, Texas, the 59-year-old songwriter starts noticing the vultures circling overhead. “We’ve been sitting still too long,” he deadpans. It’s a wry joke – the kind he’s made a name on since debuting his brilliant songwriting in the early 1990s under the cryptic moniker of Smog. But as he scans the verdant landscape of the Southern city he’s called home for more than 20 years, the ominous observation also provides insight into his restless, creative mind. In February, Callahan will release My Days Of 58, the eighth album under his real name. It’s the most direct and unflinching collection of music he’s ever recorded. From day one, the spectre of…

ON a wintry night in New Orleans, a frozen wind blows past BJ’s Lounge. This dive bar sits on a shabby corner in the Bywater, offering shelter and sanctuary to all who seek it. Here in the Upper Ninth Ward, just a bend of the Mississippi away from the neon cocktails of the French Quarter, a small cluster of venues and watering holes provide cheaper thrills without the tourist trappings. Alex Pianovich, the easy-going, sharp-witted singer-songwriter behind superlative country-blues band Greazy Alice, is ordering a round of Miller Lites. “They call this area the bar-muda triangle,” he says. Meaning: it’s an easy place to lose yourself. Outside, a cart decorated with a Buddha sporting a cracked skull serves steaming bowls of ramen. Inside, Polaroids of regulars cover the walls, Dr…

LEVON HELM From 1980’s The Legend Of Jesse James, Paul Kennerley’s all-star concept album on which Helm played the legendary gunslinger and Emmylou his wife. On “One More Shot”, Emmylou comes in after the gunshot sounds, bringing James’s story to a tearful conclusion. It does nobody any harm that the lament “one more shot just for old times” can be rendered as a celebratory toast. JOHNNY CASH The Man In Black wasn’t at his peak on 1988’s Water From The Wells Of Home album, but pairing him with Harris, Waylon Jennings and Roy Acuff on “As Long As I Live” offered a shorthand for the lineage of country music. Cash dialled down the hillbilly elements of Acuff’s classic tune, turning it into a sombre hymn. The mood is only partially…

“DID The Stone Roses take anything from The Smiths? Musically, not really – at least nothing obvious. You could argue John’s guitar on ‘Waterfall’ isn’t far from Johnny Marr’s picking style. Mani’s approach was akin to Andy Rourke: super-funky, but without slapping bass. The bigger influence was inspirational: seeing a Manchester band succeed made them think, ‘We can do it too,’ showing it wasn’t just London art-school types who could make it. “Reni was incredibly musical. You can tell he’s feeling it, not forcing it. He plays behind the beat constantly, but it’s never sloppy – it has a loose, relaxed feel, which gives him a swagger. He’s really a lovely drummer to watch, because it’s like gymnastics sitting down. “Ian’s never been known as one of the best singers…

DAVID Bowie has been served with some outstanding documentaries in recent years, from the granular detail of the Five Years trilogy to the celebratory montage of Moonage Daydream. But Bowie: The Final Act – in cinemas on Boxing Day, and on Channel 4 on January 2 for the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death – is the best of the lot. That’s partly because of what has gone before. Having seen the competition, director John Stiasny can avoid the most documented, mythologised parts of Bowie’s career – namely Ziggy and Berlin – to create an essay on mortality and creativity as much as a biography. After a riveting opening graphic sequence – a black hole becomes a black star becomes Bowie’s eye – we are dropped into Sydney in 1983. It’s…

BASS INSTINCT According to Roger McGuinn [Uncut Take 347, January 2026] David Crosby described playing bass guitar while singing as “like trying to dial two different telephones with two different numbers”. Quite so, and I’ve always been amazed that the likes of Jack Bruce, Paul McCartney and Sting even attempted it, let alone be so good at it. Simon Broad, via email SHIRES DELIGHT I enjoyed reading your retrospective of releases for 2025 [Take 346; Review Of The Year 2025] and was surprised by how many of the selections were albums I’d actually bought, including those by Wet Leg, Margo Price, Patterson Hood, Robert Plant and SG Goodman, as well as the archive release of Drive-By Truckers’ Decoration Day. You also switched me on to Wednesday’s Bleeds. But the well-deserved…

ROUGH TRADE HOW TO ENTER The letters in the shaded squares form an anagram of a song by The Stone Roses. When you’ve worked out what it is, email your answer to: competitions@uncut.co.uk. The first correct entry picked at random will win £50 of Rough Trade vouchers to spend online. Closing date: Thur, January 29, 2025. This competition is only open to European residents. CLUES ACROSS 1+10A I’d like this to buy this Dr Feelgood single but I’m not paying that much (2-4-2-3-5-2-5) 8 Cure song that had to have a good hook (5) 10 (See 1 across) 11 “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were _____? Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long”, Beach Boys (5) 12 Housemartins’ album London 0 ____ 4 (4) 13 (See 32 down)…

IT starts with a bit of minimalist boogie woogie, then dances weightlessly up the range of the keyboard, Liberace-style, before coming to rest on a single repeated high note. But you can’t really call it rest, the way Cameron Winter stabs the note again and again with fingers on both hands, first impassioned and then playful and then like he is telling us to go fuck ourselves. This is “The Rolling Stones”, the first song on Heavy Metal, the album that has turned Winter within a year from a talented indie-rock bandleader in a city full of them to the kind of performer who sells out Carnegie Hall as a matter of course. It’s possible to forget that the song is still happening, he stabs for that long before bringing…

WHEN David Bowie died on January 10, 2016, the shock was mixed with the realisation that the great shape-shifter had curated his own exit. Bowie’s final public appearance was in December 2015 at the opening of Lazarus, a jukebox musical that became a memorial service. Bowie’s final album Blackstar – released on his 69th birthday, two days before his death – was an anguished reflection on mortality. “They were the great late-life performances, the segue into the abyss,” says Paul Morley, author of Far Above The World: The Time And Space Of David Bowie. “He was always very death-fixated. He was aware of that sort of eventuality from his late teens.” But what if Bowie hadn’t died? What would he be doing? In one sense the question feels misplaced, as…

1 GREAZY ALICE Turn Our survey of the finest current New Orleans sounds kicks off with a track by the great Greazy Alice. Mainman Alex Pianovich helped to compile this CD with his expert knowledge of the Big Easy as it is right now. This is one of the highlights of the band’s excellent album As Time Goes By – head to p58 to read our feature. 2 CHRIS ACKER Wouldn’t Do For You (Buddy) Acker’s fourth album, Famous Lunch, appeared in late 2024 and found the Louisiana resident writing imagistic, honest and deeply funny songs like this, backed by his group The Growing Boys. Conjured up on the road and at a Montana residency, the 10 tracks on Famous Lunch are a testament to Acker’s talents. 3 SILVER SYNTHETIC…

“When voices are not heard, what the hell are we learning” THE UNCUT GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S KEY RELEASES World’s Gone Wrong HIGHWAY 20/THIRTY TIGERS LUCINDA WILLIAMS made her name as a chronicler of ordinary lives and a confessor of romantic travails. Over the years her music has toughened and her vocal tone hardened into the remarkable instrument we hear today. Yet she has always written with such lyrical economy, influenced by her father, the poet Miller Williams, and authors such as Flannery O’Connor, who led the way in capturing the Deep South environment of her childhood. Her purpose was curtailed, but only briefly, when she suffered a stroke in November 2020. Always a ballsy player, she dug right into rehabilitation and was touring again within a year. Weakened down…

Laughter In Summer TRANSGRESSIVE 8/10 TO begin his second studio album since becoming one of contemporary music’s most cherished rediscoveries, Beverly Glenn-Copeland utters a count of “1, 2, 3… 1, 2, 3”. It’s a seemingly simple moment that’s rich with layers of meaning. Glenn-Copeland’s placid voice exudes the same qualities of grace and patience that came in handy back when the Philadelphia-born artist was best known as a performer and composer of music for children’s television in his adopted home of Canada in the 1970s and ’80s. As something a musician may recite to launch a group into an unfamiliar tune, it’s also fitting because most of the songs on Laughter In Summer were recorded in single takes. Moreover, the album’s final song – “Let Us Dance (Movement Two)” –…

Paleo Sol THRILL JOCKEY 8/10 UNCUT readers may already be familiar with Barry Walker through his association with Ripley Johnson, for whom he serves as pedal steel guitarist in Rose City Band. Or perhaps his collaborative work alongside Patrick McDermott as country-folk duo North Americans, or else heading up experimental trio Mouth Painter, whose broad palette encompasses acid country, weird exotica and the odd freakout. In 2021, extended solo piece “Shoulda Zenith” (from the LP of the same name) fetched up on Uncut’s Ambient Americana (A Road Trip Across Psychic State Lines) CD, placing Walker in the same territory as Steve Gunn, Andrew Tuttle and Luke Schneider. And it’s here that Paleo Sol, the latest in a series of inquisitive solo albums, mostly resides. As a geologist and professor, Walker…

AFTER playing his part in the development of 1960s folk-rock, Bob Lind stepped away after his 1971 album Since There Were Circles and spent several decades as a journalist and novelist until his friend Arlo Guthrie coaxed him back. “I never stopped writing songs. I just couldn’t stand the music business,” he says. “When I’d been clean and sober a while, I finally got it through my thick skull that I still had something to say in my music that people might want to hear.” A big headsup on his comeback came when Pulp recorded a song titled “Bob Lind (The Only Way Is Down)” on their album We Love Life. “My gratitude is off the charts,” he says. “Pulp was red hot and my career was ice cold. Jarvis…

What were those early years of The Style Council like? PAUL WELLER: For the first couple of years it was more like a collective, as we’d get different people in for whatever track. We had a kind of band, but we’d swap around a lot. Café Bleu was very eclectic, to say the least. I wanted more of a band sound after that, to give it an overall sound. What did you make of Café Bleu back then? WELLER: As our opening statement, I was happy with it. People had mixed feelings about it, but I anticipated that. Commercially, it did all right. STEVE WHITE (drums): Paul and Mick were trying to find their way on Café Bleu. There’s a sense of humour about it in the way Paul doesn’t…

The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel 1965 (reissue, 1995) UNIVERSAL 9/10 ONE of the signal releases from Miles Davis’s second ‘great quintet’, the twonight stand recorded for The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel 1965 has long been held in high esteem by both Davis obsessives and jazz scholars. It wasn’t simply a case of conquering personal trials and tribulations that made the music here seem so relevant and biting, though surely that has something to do with its significance. The quintet had been off the road for seven months while Davis suffered through firstly hip surgery, then further surgery for a broken leg, and a subsequent implanted plastic hip joint. By 1965, the second great quartet of Davis, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Ron Carter and Wayne Shorter had…

TERRY ALLEN LUBBOCK (ON EVERYTHING) FATE, 1979 “A perfect double record. It’s a homage to his home town. Song after song of satirical, tongue-in-cheek humour but always compassionate and beautiful.” THE ROLLING STONES EXILE ON MAIN ST ROLLING STONES RECORDS, 1972 “The Stones at their peak. There’s a sadness and a bleakness to it, then these little mountains of hope. I’ve listened to that record more than any other, I’m sure of that.” TOWNES VAN ZANDT LIVE AT THE OLD QUARTER TOMATO, 1977 “Most of my favourite Townes songs in their rawest form, plus his stupid fucking jokes. It’s nice to hear a guy playing in a bar and generally getting ignored, even though he’s maybe the greatest songwriter who ever lived.” KANYE WEST LATE REGISTRATION ROC-A-FELLA, 2005 “Hip-hop was…

EMMYLOU Harris is in a reflective mood. For the last few years she has been working on a memoir, a lengthy process which may be nearing a conclusion. The book will arrive, she hopes, in a year or so’s time. Before then there is a Farewell Tour, which will offer British and European audiences a final chance to experience one of the great country voices. (Harris will continue to play in the States “until they bring the hook out”.) And what has she learned from this period of introspection? “It’s really always about the song, isn’t it?” Harris tells Uncut. “It’s funny how the songs have grown with me. If they’re that good, you never grow tired of doing them. And, of course, it’s the band. My musicians are wonderful.…

THE Undertones were sitting together in a pew at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds. It was John Peel’s funeral, and the music world had turned out in force to say goodbye, with Jack White and Robert Plant among the mourners. “They had a beautiful eulogy and then the pallbearers lifted John Peel’s coffin,” recalls drummer Billy Doherty. “As they started walking down the aisle, they began playing ‘Teenage Kicks’. We could hear the people outside the church singing. We never expected that. We were just showing our respect and gratitude. But our song had that impact and it was phenomenal.” Undertones guitarist John O’Neill wrote “Teenage Kicks” in his Derry bedroom in summer 1977, drawing on a love of ’60s girl bands, ’70s glam and early punk singles…

“WE’LL move straight forward now into our adventures in the land of folk,” Robert Plant tells the audience, “in the land of misery, disappointment, heartache, lies… just all the usual great stuff that makes a song so pleasurable.” In line with Plant’s law, there’s plenty of misery to be found in this hour-and-a-half in the company of Saving Grace – orphans, broken hearts, the clammy grasp of Gollum “and the evil one” – and, conversely, a great deal of pleasure too. For one, the sound is impeccable, thanks to Plant’s longtime live sound engineer Mark Kennedy. Every pick of a baritone guitar or reverse-echoed banjo pluck, each light brush of a cymbal or whispered harmony, is audible and distinguishable in the plush environs of the Festival Hall. Even more importantly,…

SENTIMENTAL VALUE There’s an epidemic of daddy issues abroad in cinemas right now. Last month, Noah Baumbach cast George Clooney as the beloved Hollywood icon Jay Kelly, desperately spending his autumn years in pursuit of the grown children he neglected in his youth. This month three new movies reckon in their own ways with the legacies of doomed dads, dead dads and plain old despairing dads. The richest of these is Sentimental Value, the latest film by the Norwegian laureate of black existential comedy, Joachim Trier. The Worst Person In The World may have been retrospectively packaged as the last instalment in his “Oslo Trilogy,” but it is clear by now that the patient cartography of that city’s light, streets and lost souls is a lifetime project for Trier. This…

IT’S 2021, and Marianne Faithfull is admiring a black-and-white TV clip of her anarchic younger self. “I think I’m really powerful,” she tells the interviewer in 1968. Still tripping on last night’s acid, she advocates giving money directly to the poor instead of taxes for war, and hopes to “mess up” the status quo. Society would collapse, she’s warned. “Yeah,” she says sweetly. “Wouldn’t it be lovely?” It’s one of many fruitful interactions between past and present in Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth’s new film Broken English, which – like their Nick Cave doc 20,000 Days On Earth – employs fictional elements to explore their subject. Here Tilda Swinton’s Ministry Of Not Forgetting tries to rescue Faithfull’s legacy from Stones muse cliché, as George MacKay presents rarely seen footage and…

From The Mar-Kays to The Blues Brothers, his sharp, succinct guitar style shaped the sound of Southern soul STEVE Cropper was often asked about the Memphis Sound and his part in it. He struggled with both parts of the question. The sound, he suggested, was a matter of geography multiplied by hard work. A farm boy from Missouri, he moved to Memphis aged nine and fell under the spell of the gospel music he heard on WDIA, America’s first black radio station. So it was that when Otis Redding auditioned for Stax Records, Cropper’s “church chords” prompted an extraordinary rendition of “These Arms Of Mine”. At times, Cropper’s thoughts about the music veered towards the ethereal. He talked about it being rooted in a sense of “inner love”. As to…

INITIALLY drawn towards more straightforward folk, it was after watching a John Martyn performance on an old episode of Top Of The Pops that something clicked. “He had an Echoplex machine and that inspired me to get some loop pedals and start looping – which became my thing,” Lucy Gooch recalls. “Guitars at first, then synth for more accuracy, but it was when I began looping vocals that I began to get more of a reaction from the people around me.” Gooch’s music arrived at just the right time: a five-track EP, “Rushing” – released on US micro-label Past Inside The Present in January 2020 – quickly found an audience in a locked down world hungry for evocative, otherworldly sounds; she then signed to Fire Records for a follow-up EP,…

Attitude Adjustment CHERRY RED 7/10 HOW do you get the Buzzcocks sound? Steve Diggle says that’s like a chef revealing his secrets, but admits that one crucial ingredient is his old H&H amp. This was acquired almost 50 years ago with the advance the band got for signing to United Artists – you can see it on the cover of Singles Going Steady. “It gives that transistorised valve sound and you can hear it very distinctively on that first album,” he explains. “In Manchester, people wondered why we used these little amps, but it meant you could get distortion at a very low volume, and that became our identity. Double-track a riff through the H&H amp and you get that unique Buzzcocks sound.” The double-tracked H&H riff pops up a…

Momoko STRUT 7/10 SINGER-SONGWRITER, drummer and multi instrumentalist Momoko Gill has long been a key background player in the community of jazz-adjacent artists who have coalesced around north London’s semi-legendary Total Refreshment Centre studio complex, live venue and social hub. After spending much of her childhood and teens in Japan and California, Gill was inspired to forge her musical career in multicultural London, initially through collaborations with more established leftfield musicians including Matthew Herbert, Alabaster DePlume, Coby Sey and Tirzah. Many of these bigger names repay the favour with guest appearances on this impressively eclectic solo debut, which straddles the line between spiritual jazz, retro-inflected soul and contemporary electronica, to generally fruitful effect. An undertow of political commentary also lurks between these fragrant grooves, mostly latent, occasionally explicit. Momoko arrives…

“I felt so sick I spat on their lifestyles with a runaway pride” REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS Café Bleu Special Edition UNIVERSAL THERE’S a live recording in this boxset that seems to perfectly embody the challenges faced by Paul Weller after he split up The Jam. He and his new band, The Style Council, are playing the Goldiggers in Chippenham, Wiltshire, in March 1984, showcasing tracks from the upcoming Café Bleu album to an increasingly restless audience. “I need absolute quiet for this number,” Weller insists, introducing a bossa nova called “The Whole Point Of No Return”. The crowd start wolf-whistling as Dee C Lee comes out to sing “The Paris Match” and, as the band perform low-key acoustic songs inspired variously by Antônio Carlos Jobim,…

The New Worlds Fair (50th Anniversary Edition) THINK LIKE A KEY 8/10 BY the mid-1970s, Michael Moorcock was accustomed to inventing the future. A prolific, anarchistic author deeply in touch with the counterculture, he crafted countless short stories and novels throughout the ’60s, edited New Worlds magazine and led the new wave of science fiction, concentrating on literary experimentation, allegories and fantastical visions rather than hard technology. He’d influenced the realm of music, too, most notably collaborating with Hawkwind in the early ’70s as they evolved from Ladbroke Grove stoners to glorious intergalactic drone-rockers. How much impact Moorcock’s work had on Bowie is hard to discern – though the two certainly knew each other – but years before Ziggy Stardust first touched down in Aylesbury the author had created Jerry…

ARTISTS, understandably, tend to develop a detached attitude to their works of half a lifetime ago. “Whatever people interpret is fine by me,” says Natasha Khan of Bat For Lashes’ debut, Fur And Gold. “It’s their music now.” Khan hadn’t listened to the album for many years, prior to setting about the remastering of the reissue with original co-producer David Kosten. She sounds pleasantly surprised. “I love listening to it now,” she says. “It holds up, I think, because the atmospheres, textures and effects were chosen for very personal and specific reasons. It holds a magic that encapsulated my childhood and my whole life leading up to that point. It feels like a fairytale that you can bring from childhood through to adulthood, and that’s what I wanted initially, for…

SCOTT BALLEW PARADISO LEISURE RODEO “It’s got a country-folk vibe for half of it, then the other half veers into noisy Neil Young territory. He’s a fantastic songwriter.” SLOW MOTION COWBOYS WOLF OF ST ELMO ARKAM RECORDS “Pretty much a straight-down-the middle country record with that Waylon funky country feel.” THE WHIP APPEAL SHIMMERING SEED FULL-TILT RECORDS “James Coarse and Lily Fine are a really cool boy-girl duo. This record has almost a Pavement vibe to it. The songs are beautiful and dark.” MAGGIE KOERNER UPSTATE 4-MILE DRIVE “It’s rare for the downtown indie-folk scene and the uptown funk scene to collide, but she’s collided them. She’s a powerful singer and a great songwriter.” CHRIS LYONS PAINTERS STREET NUDIE RECORDS “It’s a beautiful record, so breezy and nice. A lot…

MIKE Nesmith once asked John Lennon what he thought of The Monkees. Do you know what he said? “I think you’re the greatest comic talent since the Marx Brothers.” That was extremely accurate. You see, The Monkees weren’t a band. We were the cast of a musical comedy about an imaginary band. After we were cast, they showed us Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy movies, taking us back to the source of physical and verbal comedy. Interestingly, they never showed us The Three Stooges. You know why? From the start, it was agreed that you would never see a Monkee hit another Monkee. We were always in it together. I hadn’t met any of the boys before we auditioned. Though I must have seen Mike when he was the…

THE Empress Ballroom is the antique heart of Blackpool’s Winter Gardens, a late-Victorian entertainment hub overlooking the Irish Sea. Its postwar reputation was built on ballroom dance competitions, big-band jazz and pricey dining experiences. Less celebrated was its infrequent status as a rock venue. The Rolling Stones brought notoriety after an Empress riot in 1964, leading to a Blackpool ban that lasted more than 40 years. Pink Floyd, Mott The Hoople and Queen played there later on, but by 1989 the ballroom was off the map in terms of live rock music. That is, until The Stone Roses came to town on August 12. Arriving en masse in the afternoon, 4,000 followers swept into the ballroom that night in various states of delirium. “There was something in the air,” bassist…

“AT that time, The Late Show was covering the waterfront for live performance on the BBC, so every week there was someone new in. I remember listening to The Stone Roses’ album on cassette, before they were booked. There was quite a lot of excitement about them. “When the sound failed, I remember a voice in my ear from the gallery saying, ‘Just don’t do anything!’ But I thought I couldn’t just let this go on. So I walked on – you can see that I’m just kind of busking it – and went into the next link, about Martin Parr. Then I was aware that Ian Brown was shouting behind me. “It’s funny, because when you look back at it now I seem quite schoolma’am-y and prim, but I…

INEVITABLY, all the talk beforehand is about volume. Will Wembley’s decibel police waive their usual restrictions to allow for the full, uninhibited noise blitzkrieg? On the other hand, nobody wants to aggravate their tinnitus, even if the war stories all help to burnish the My Bloody Valentine legend that has drawn close to 10,000 people here tonight. But we needn’t have worried. While earplugs are still very much recommended, the glorious cacophony that emerges from the Arena’s six-storey speaker stacks as “I Only Said” roars into life is physical rather than ear-bleeding, buffeting you like a storm, enveloping you like a fog, engulfing you like a sea. Kevin Shields has taken to wearing a large black hat that makes him look like he’s about to drown some witches, but otherwise…

SONG SUNG BLUE OPENS JANUARY 1 Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson star in this Craig Gillespie-directed biopic of a husband-and-wife Neil Diamond tribute band. PETER HUJAR’S DAY OPENS JANUARY 2 Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall star in Ira Sachs’ 16mm chamber piece, recreating a 1974 conversation between the photographer and writer Linda Rosenkrantz. SOULM8TE OPENS JANUARY 9 The M3GAN universe expands with this erotic thriller where a lonely man tries to program the perfect partner and, predictably, creates a living nightmare. GIANT OPENS JANUARY 9 Another boxing biopic, this time charting the rise of Sheffield’s Prince Naseem Hamed (Amir El-Masry) under the tutelage of Brendan Ingle (Pierce Brosnan). RENTAL FAMILY OPENS JANUARY 16 Beef director Hikari makes her feature debut with this Tokyo-set drama starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a down-and-out…

BEST BUY MERIDIAN ELLIPSE £1,900 IF you’re going to spend big on a wireless speaker, you’re entitled to expect excellence at every turn: great sound, impeccable ergonomics, interesting design and that most intangible of qualities – pride of ownership. It’s safe to say the Meridian Ellipse covers all of these bases and in some style – not least the “spending big” bit. In photos, the Ellipse looks to owe more than a little to the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin, a product that’s in part responsible for validating the whole ‘really expensive wireless speaker’ category. But the Ellipse is usefully smaller and is packed with the sort of technologies that Meridian packs into its high-end active stereo speakers (and by ‘high-end’ I mean £60k per pair). It’s hand-built in the UK,…