October 2nd, 2012

Glasvegas will take a break from recording their third album by embarking on a year-ending tour of the UK.

The Pogues will celebrate their 30th anniversary with an end-of-year gig in London, it has been confirmed.

Though with us for only a short time during the post punk years of the late Seventies and early Eighties, Joy Division‘s legend makes them one of Manchester’s most mythologised groups, as well as one of the cities most influential bands.

And though the story itself has been put to film several times and told by a number of people who were around at the time, no one from the group has ever taken the tale up themselves, until now.

Here, Peter Hook talks to Live4ever contributor Carl Stanley about why he felt the time was right for his new book Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division and of all the memories his writing brought back.

Rare footage of The Beatles filming the Magical Mystery Tour has been unveiled ahead of the 1967 movie’s re-release later this month.

The Black Keys are pressing on with plans to record a new album early next year, and hope to again have the multi-talented Danger Mouse on board as producer, reports CBS Local.

Books about bands – and, for that matter, rock music in general – are big business, playing on the compulsive need of fans to know the finer details; to inhabit a space and time in which the songs they so lovingly play on their iPods and car stereos flourished, to take a peek between the ears of the artists who created them.

It’s no surprise then that when such books are penned by bands and artists themselves, a more coveted bounty of music ephemera is laid bare.

Peter Hook’s Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division is a lucid and unromantic account of the band’s short life and a veritable treasure trove for those aforementioned fans. Between chapters, a detailed timeline is presented, sketching Joy Division’s gigging history and notable events of the period, including the rise of bands like the Buzzcocks and the Sex Pistols, and the goings on at the then-nascent Factory Records.

Another week, another round of Smiths reunion rumours.

And next up with the whispers is celebrity gossip site Holy Moly, which is claiming to have heard from ‘several credible sources’ that the hugely influential British group will reunite next year with a series of gigs, including Glastonbury, already booked.