I thought seeing Lou Reed play ‘Berlin’ was excitement enough for June. Now comes news that Leonard Cohen is to tour for the first time in nearly thirty years. Regular readers will remember that I visited his home on Hydra last September. I saw him play Birmingham on the last tour, in ’79, and briefly met him in Liverpool in ’75, after his show at the Empire (I’ll save that story for another time). If his performance with U2 in the recent film is anything to go by, Leonard hasn’t got much voice left, but if he just recites his lyrics (many of which started as poems) as he does in the video below, I’ll be happy. That is, if I can get a ticket…

I somehow managed not to notice that my last entry was the 100th one on this blog, so here we are, well and truly into treble figures, with entry 101. I’m kind of excited about going to see Duffy at the Bodega Social tonight (I’ve decided that her voice is better than Lulu’s, although the latter maybe had a better knack of song choice in her Atco soul days). I’m delighted that I’ve got front row seats for Lou Reed’s Berlin tour when it hits Nottingham in June. But what’s really thrilling me at the moment is the album by Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago which is a haunting, beautiful breakup album, mostly recorded, evidently, while he spent four months in a remote cabin…

I’ve been an American politics junkie since, age 14, I got caught up in George McGovern’s 1972 campaign against Richard Nixon. So I’ll be watching tonight’s results from Texas and Ohio with great interest. As a Brit, it doesn’t behove me to take sides in Obama vs Hillary but my favourite live band, Canada’s Arcade Fire, have been campaigning for Obama in the last week (two of them were born in the US, so I guess they have the right). Here they are in Cleveland, performing a rather apt Sam Cooke classic. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qunFl3syXQ4]

I learnt a new phrase this week. After his talk to the MA on Monday I went out for a quick meal with Mike and described how I’d spent half my morning deleting and adding tunes to iTunes. ‘Ah yes’, he said, ‘I call that iPod farming’. And that’s what I’m doing now, before going to an exhibition and taking my nephew swimming. Only, there’s an added urgency. I’ve had a 60GB iPod photo for nearly three years and it’s been full since Christmas. I’ve taken various precautionary measures – unclicking most files over 10MB on my iTunes, converting tunes with a high bit-rate to 128AACs, but this week I got to over 14,000 tracks and, when I updated my iPod, first it refused to…

Since I have him coming to talk to my MA students tomorrow night, I think it rather behoves me to link to my pal Mike’s Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? project, now in its sixth year. It’s a concept recently nicked by the BBC and it’s a load of fun if you’ve got any interest in popular music. Enjoy. And since I’ve been listening to this album for weeks with great joy (and bought their first album in New York this month), here’s some video of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, with the title track of 100 Days, 100 Nights