2008 saw the welcome return of the concert film to our cinema screens.  What with Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light, featuring The Rolling Stones during two nights at New York City’s Beacon Theatre in 2006 and, a little closer to home, Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys Live at the Apollo, recorded in Manchester and shown around the country courtesy of Vue Cinemas.  But one concert film released last year may well have escaped your notice.  Namely, Lou Reed’s Berlin.

Shown only in a handful of cinemas including the Showroom in Sheffield, this 82 minute account of Lou Reed’s masterpiece shot 33 years after the release of the album and directed by Julian Schnabel - check out his film Basquiat if you’ve never heard of him – is a masterpiece in itself.  It’s also as raw as a concert film should be and reminded me very much of the films of Murray Lerner (Festival, Bob Dylan – The Other Side of the Mirror – Live at the Newport Folk Festival  1963 -1965 and The Who – Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970).

Plastic Fuzz

The underlying significance of all this continued activity is that Leeds could now be said to possess a mature creative milieu in which its musical practitioners operate. This means that even when a band tipped for success like Mother Vulpine falls apart, two bands spring up in its place (Dinosaur Pile Up and Pulled Apart By Horses) who almost instantly start to make waves of their own. Promoters are

As it will become clear shortly, there's an apparent grand design beginning to creep into these columns in so far as I find myself once again plundering last months effort for at least the starting point of this one. This may appear to be part of some elaborately thought out, post-post modern strategy that works itself out as some kind of thematic loop that eventually resolves itself sometime in 2015 with the revelation that it was all, like, connected, man, y'know? Or that it was all some master plan to provide the basis for my first book. No. Up to now this has quite definitely been a strategy based on expediency and desperation. Put simply, the internal monologue goes something like this - "Oh chuff, here's the deadline.....again! What am I going to write about?  I haven't got anything to write about! Oh, bugger. What did I write about last time...........er......er, OK, l'll use that". Although, if this does actually turn out to be a proper strategy that does eventually form the basis of a book that sells several million copies, then of course it was deliberate all along! I'll just have to make sure this intro is excised from the record, of course.

So, anyway, the "that" for this month is my ever increasing pile of unread books that I alluded to in passing last month.