1/ Cat Power to recreate / reenact the entirety of Bob Dylan's legendary 1966 concert at the Royal Albert Hall... at the actual Royal Albert Hall, this November.
2/ The Guardian's Ben Beaumont-Thomas has a good old rant about the "Blowin' in the Wind" £1.5m fetish object auction:
"For this sale at Christie’s auction house, Dylan rerecorded the song in the studio for the first time since its original take in 1962. The take was then etched into a lacquer-coated aluminium disc – only one will ever be made – and housed in a bespoke walnut and white oak cabinet with an etched titanium plaque. This new format, Ionic Original, is the lobotomised brainchild of producer T Bone Burnett [who] hails the format as the “pinnacle of recorded sound” in terms of sound fidelity.... Part of me thinks that if Burnett can hoodwink millionaires out of their wealth, more power to him.... [Yet it's] also the absurd pinnacle of vinyl fetishism....The Ionic Original format is the grotesque extremity of this malaise, and one which, in its high-profile financial success, deepens it.... The elitist endeavour runs counter to the very spirit of popular music. The cheapness and replicability of pop – which, ignoring its own financial inequalities for now, streaming takes to a frankly glorious scale – is what makes it such a defining cultural medium. To rerecord one of history’s greatest songs and let only one person hear it is a ghastly reversal of the very concept of “popular”.... a song isn’t an artefact: it blows in the wind. To trap it in a single white oak box – the same hoarding instinct that has destabilised so much culture over the years – dishonours music itself."
