Stephen Malkmus of Pavement fame has been in the UK this week touring his seventh album Sparkle Hard, as Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks.
 
Cat Power’s Chan Marshall was also in the UK the same week for her Roundhouse Camden show which Stephen went along to.
 
The Sparkle Hard LP came out back in May and featured Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon on a track Refute.
 
Next year will be Pavement’s 30th Anniversary but Malkmus has downplayed any chance of a reunion in interviews because of the Jicks touring and him having other projects going on.
 
We’ll hear more on those in due course in the music news - I checked in with Stephen Malkmus for BBC Radio 6 Music to see how it’s all been going on the road…

​A special run of gigs for Warchild have been announced with Jon Hopkins, Alexis Taylor and Everything Everything on the bill.
 
The three ‘Safe and Sound’ shows are taking place on the 25th, 26th and 27th November at Shepherd’s Bush Empire with all proceeds going towards Warchild’s Learn To Live campaign, raising money for children affected by conflict.
 
Jon has played a few charity gigs in the past few years for Help Refugees, Amnesty and the David Lynch Foundation and has Alexis Taylor and George Fitzgerald providing support on November 25th kicking off the trio of gigs.
 
The producer has had a huge year, releasing his fifth solo album Singularity in May, headlining festival stages including Wilderness, touring Europe and the next run is a huge UK tour.
 
I checked in with Jon Hopkins for BBC Radio 6 Music to discuss this charity show and how it marks the start of a different kind of live setting for his music…

We recently heard from Reeves Gabrels on his work on the re-versioned Never Let Me Down album coming out on the new Bowie Box Set Loving The Alien later this year.

He of course is also a member of The Cure and played with them at their British Summertime Hyde Park show earlier this month.

There’s no doubt about it, that show will be remembered in years to come.

In the midst of a heat wave, England had got through to the semi-final of the World Cup for the first time in many years earlier that day and the band played a storming set including many of their hits.

I spoke to Reeves for BBC Radio 6 Music to get a bit more insight into what it was like from the band’s viewpoint…

​Cat Power has announced details of her very much anticipated and rumoured new album, her first in six years. I for one am EXCITED ABOUT THIS VERY MUCH!
 
It’s titled Wanderer and will be released October 5th. The last album we got from Cat Power was Sun back in 2012.  Her fourth studio album from 1998 Moon Pix is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year.
 
Produced entirely by Chan Marshall her 10th offering Wanderer includes appearances from long-time friends and compatriots and guest vocals from friend and recent tour mate Lana Del Rey on the song Woman.
 
The LP was written and recorded in Miami and Los Angeles over the course of the last few years. 
 
Cat Power will be touring internationally from September 15th in the US, Europe with a London Roundhouse show on October 23rd. The album is available to pre-order now on baby blue vinyl.
 
Here’s Chan Marshall on the phone with yours truly (a genuine pleasure from start to finish) for BBC 6 Music, with one of her very first interviews about the new record….

Hi there - BOWIE BOXSET NEWS.

The 12th October will see the release of the latest in the series of career spanning David Bowie box sets. So far the first three have covered from 1969 through to 1982.
 
The next is called 'LOVING THE ALIEN' and reflects 1983 - 1988.
 
The eleven CD, fifteen-piece vinyl set which includes newly remastered versions of Bowie's most successful period - starting off with 'LET'S DANCE' which propelled him into a commercially mainstream stadium-filling stratosphere, then it's follow up  'TONIGHT', 'NEVER LET ME DOWN, the live album 'GLASS SPIDER (Live Montreal '87)' and the previously unreleased 'SERIOUS MOONLIGHT' live album.
 
Now the accepted wisdom is that while 'LET'S DANCE' was all killer, and 'TONIGHT' has its moments (Loving The Alien) but 'NEVER LET ME DOWN' wasn't Bowie's finest moment, and admittedly the 80's production hasn't aged that well.
 
So this set includes a complete re-versioning of the album.
 
Early this year engineer Mario McNulty - who had remixed the album's track Time Will Crawl back in 2008 with Bowie - he got in the studio with drummer Sterling Campbell, bassist Tim Lefebvre (who played on Blackstar) and guitarists Reeves Gabrels and David Torn to record a new version of the album with Bowie's original vocals.
 
Reeves Gabrels was David's guitarist from 1988 through to 1999. He was also in Bowie's heavy alt rock group Tin Machine and plays in The Cure. I spoke to him for BBC 6 Music about the project...

​Austin band White Denim are gearing up to the release of their new album Performance on August 24th.
 
They recently shared Magazin and have just followed that up with It Might Get Dark.
 
The band have two shows at London’s Moth Club on August 29th and a slot at End of the Road Festival before some more dates in Europe and a full Roundhouse show in London on October 11th. They are a fantastic band live and that will be their biggest UK headline show to date.
 
Performance comes two years on from Stiff and marks seven albums since the group’s inception.
 
I got on the phone with singer, songwriter and guitarist James Petralli for BBC 6 Music to discuss the new record for which they welcomed two new members, a drummer and a keyboardist and made in the studio they’ve built on home turf….

Whitney a new film by Oscar and BAFTA award-winning filmmaker Kevin McDonald about the megastar Whitney Houston was just released in UK cinemas.
 
It's the definitive account of her life and career and the only film supported by the late singer's estate featuring unreleased recordings, rare footage and live performances recorded at various stages of her life, home movie footage and new interviews with her family and those that worked with her and for her.
 
Kevin MacDonald's credits include Marley, Touching The Void and The Last King of Scotland and this project was aided by Searching For Sugarman producer Simon Chinn and multi-Emmy Award nominated producer Lisa Erspamer alongside the estate and Whitney's sister-in-law Patricia Houston.
 
Erspamer produced Whitney's last major interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2009. At the time Whitney hadn't done a big interview since the Diane Sawyer interview in 2002 and she was seeing a bit of a comeback. A few years after her death in 2012 Erspamer got the ball rolling on the film.
 
Whitney offers a very real account of the meteoric highs and lows of her career of one of the biggest female artists of our time, her version of I Will Always Love You from The Bodyguard soundtrack is the biggest selling single of all time by a female artist.
 
The film sheds light on her struggles with drug addiction or her volatile marriage to Bobby Brown and it alleges that Whitney and her brother were sexually abused as children by their cousin Dee Dee Warwick, the sister of Dionne Warwick.
 
​I spoke to Lisa Erspamer and Patricia Houston for BBC 6 Music about making the film...

Such a pleasure to be back on the panel of this year's Fender Undiscovered Artist of the Year competition alongside Max from You Me At Six, Roisin from The Independent and Neil from Fender. Here's the 12 contestants battling it out to be in the live final next Tuesday.