XL Recordings

Artist: Brendan Benson
Album: My Old, Familiar Friend
Release Date: August 18
Label: ATO

Tracklist:

01 A Whole Lot Better
02 Eyes on the Horizon
03 Garbage Day
04 Gonowhere
05 Feel Like Taking You Home
06 You Make a Fool Out of Me
07 Poised and Ready
08 Don't Want to Talk
09 Misery
10 Lesson Learned
11 Borrow

Details: Fourth solo album from the singer-songwriter and Raconteurs co-frontman. Pixies...

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Last-ditch careerism is often the reason why these 'elite' gatherings are rarely the sum of their parts

A close friend of mine, called Steve, once got down to the last four people auditioning to sing in Velvet Revolver. While putting together the Guns N' Roses offshoot, Slash had heard an album by the band that Steve was singing with at the time, and flew him to LA to write with him, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum. In the X Factor-esque documentary made about their search for a singer, Steve's 30 seconds traced the breakdown of his relationship with Sorum and ended with the traditional reality TV shot of Steve walking in slow motion down a corridor with his guitar over his shoulder to the strains of whichever Aerosmith ballad might best suggest that his life, career and dreams were irreversibly over. The next shot was of drug-buggered ex-Stone Temple Pilots camp commandant Scott Weiland. Velvet Revolver, it was declared, were to be a "supergroup".

This week sees the announcement of another of this most wretched and disappointing of concepts: Chickenfoot. This ungodly collective comprises of Van Halen's Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and Joe Satriani, presumably keen to raise legal fees for his copyright assailment of Coldplay's Viva La Vida. But surely only the most blindly optimistic fan of the drumming on Under the Bridge is really expecting genius. Since the sultan of

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Four free tracks from The Raconteurs' set at Bonnaroo 2008 are to be made available this Sunday (January 11), courtesy of the festival.

Four free tracks from The Raconteurs' set at Bonnaroo 2008 are to be made available this Sunday (January 11), courtesy of the festival.