Went to see that Joy Division film last night. And who should have been sitting in front of me but Beth Ditto of the Gossip! Only the daft bint kept getting up and blocking my view. "Sit down Beth!", I cried. "You're standing in the way of Control!"*

  Suitably chastised, she took her seats and I was able to give my full attention Anton Corbijn's beautiful biopic. And it is beautiful - the sharp monochrome photography giving that forgotten post-punk England of Victorian factories, brutalist tower blocks and the BR Intercity 125 a deliciously bleak elegance. I even found myself fetishising the plug sockets above Ian Curtis's hospital bed at one point, to say nothing of the bottle of HP Sauce that compliments a poignant fry-up cooked by Bernard Sumner, né Albrecht**. It is the perfect backdrop to Joy Division's music. (Would today's Britain of Virgin trains and All Bar Ones look so crisp in a Babyshambles biopic 25 years' hence I wonder?) 

However, though it's hard to separate the various components, without Corbijn's eye and the sterling acting (from the heartbreaking Samantha Morton as Deborah Curtis in particular), I'm not sure the screenplay would have merited the five stars Control has earned from most quarters. Like the much-praised Walk The Line, it fell a little too readily into rock biopic cliché (drugs, depression); neither film really identified what it was specifically about Johnny Cash or Ian Curtis that continues to haunt and hum. Sam Riley I found a bit too likeable, actually, too helpful in the employment exchange where he worked, too much the dreamy scruff as a teen, so that when he walked down a Macclesfield street with HATE written on his back, or Joy Division emitted their still deeply forbidding sound, you wondered quite where it was coming from. This is a man who, legend has it, forced his wife to vote for Thatcher and dug Nazis. The point where he refused to go on stage, complaining that no one really understood quite how much he gave in performance, came closest. But the film was a little too evasive about the source of that horror; an artfully composed shot of a gas ring doesn't quite do it. Still - you must see it if you haven't. Made me ache to be in a band again.

On the bus on the way home, I had a minor argument with my girlfriend about Joy Division. I was raving about them; she dug the music, sure, but couldn't really do with more than one song in a row, and would rather that song was Love Will Tear Us Apart. The intensity that draws me in (though I do find them melodically frustrating and incidentally have never really seen the appeal of New Order) is precisely what puts her off. If in a Joy Division sort of mood on her morning commute, she would prefer to listen to someone like the Editors (a band I had totally dismissed until we saw them accidentally perform a genuinely moving set in the piss at Glastonbury). So Joy Division are the distilled essence, the ur-band, which an act like Editors then dilute with less forbidding instrumentation, easier melodies and more vague lyrics.

Seeing young Ian Curtis lying on his bed listening to Bowie, I can't help but think the main reason for this trend of music making isn't merely their running out of ideas, but simple supply and demand. We rarely listen to music as a primary activity nowadays - so don't want to be that involved in it. If there is one single element contemporary music is lacking right now, it is intensity, that primal response to environment and emotion. It sort of scares us, the dark possibilities, the unknown pleasures that a band of Joy Division's intensity might hint at, but we still like recalling that original pang. Then again, to go back to my parenthetical question in the second paragraph - well, it would take a Corbijn to distill modern Britain's garish complexities into a coherent picture.

*Thanks to my friend Alex for that gem
**A scene also praised by Nick Curtis on his film blog. Do I have no original ideas?

It's night-time in the big city. A nurse lights up the last cigarette in the pack. A telephone rings in an empty room. It's Theme Time Radio Hour, with your host, Bob Dylan...

What a thrill these words, or variations thereon, send down my spine! I have listened almost to nothing else but the dreams, themes and schemes of DJ Dylan's internet radio show Theme Time Radio Hour, downloaded in a big, possibly illegal bundle of podcast, these past few weeks. I could happily spend the next few months doing the same.

The format is startlingly simple: each week (and I know this is old news for those who subscribed to the original webcasts, but timely as the series is restarting on Radio 2) Bob takes a theme, like Mother, or Dogs, or Baseball, or the Bible, and plays a bunch of records on that ticket. Mad rockabilly stompers, country weepies, lost boxers from the Stax label, dusty calypsos, ghosts of folk songs, and amusing curios such as How Much Is That Doggy in the Window? which once spent ten weeks on top of the American chart.

In between, he details the musicians' careers, recites interesting bits of the lyrics, lists things ("we're talking about jail, prison, chokey, etc"), ambles around the theme ("here's my recipe for a mint julep", he says on the Drink episode, and gives you his recipe) and plays assorted period advertisements and crass but not too annoying messages from celebrities - Martin Sheen talking briefly about his father for example.

There are many reasons why Theme Time Radio Hour has taken its place between bacon and eggs in my list of the greatest thing ever: the tiny poem that begins each broadcast; Dylan's way of saying dates (nineteen and sixty seven, eighten and ninety six, etc); the e-mail section, where he receives an always-baffling message from people like George Clooney and Kelly Clarkson; the mysterious fact that each theme seems to be based on an unmentioned song of Dylan's. They can all be boiled down to two: the first being the fascination of the records he plays - which open up a whole new world of listening - and the second being the fascination, of course, of Dylan himself.

The Dylan of today, of course, is intent on defying expectations, being non-judgemental to the point of perversity - witness his strange appearance in US commercials, or his odd Facebook marketing campaign. On the Rich Man, Poor Man episode, for example, he makes no comment on the relative positions of each - aware he is now a rich man himself, I guess - and cracks jokes about the Swedish model of high taxation and welfare provision ("I could sure do with a Swedish model right now..."). He positions himself as an old timer on a porch, and each time he offers an insight into the modern world - revealing his affection for Ben Stiller's Zoolander, for example - feels like a gift, as if he's hinting that the traditions he's documenting do find their continuation, that something like Coffee or Baseball goes on, themes that bridge the old and the new with frames of reference that make sense in whichever time frame you choose. The world seems quite delightful again - and the lack of moral judgement in all this observing is key to this - those dreams, themes and schemes alive with possibilities.

As for the music, I had always swallowed the received wisdom of rock music having its roots in blues and country, but only by listening to a large cross-section of the stuff do you realise exactly how. It's partly because a lot of the songs he plays are generic, not famous hits by pioneers but curios by obscure artists, which always teach you more about the genre itself.

Naturally, all of this casts Dylan in a newly intriguing light. His habit of quoting the lyrics reveals how much of this art we have lost, and hearing a large swathe of the music he emerged from, you appreciate how he upheld these traditions of telling proper stories, and also how radical he was (last Sunday's Newport documentary [when I incidentally wrote this piece but for some reason didn't post it, annoyingly] reinforced this). Listen again to something like When the Ship Comes In and you appreciate the innovations of his rhythm and phrasing even before he went electric, even discounting the words themselves, and try It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding, and what a strange collections of themes you find. It is a wonderful thing when you finally feel something you had merely thought before.

I am sure I was not the only one mildly perplexed by Monday night's Q Awards. (I of course was at the Evening Standard Influentials party at the Design Museum, otherwise, lack of invitation notwithstanding, I'm sure I'd have been there to report on such amusing antics as Damon Albarn stealing rum and Alexa from Popworld and her near-namesake Turner from Arctic Monkeys dancing in what the London Lite evocatively termed a "steamy clinch"). Hungover, I read of the winners the following morning in the press. Here are some selected highlights, omitting those few (Muse, Kate Nash) whose recent output was the inspiration for their garland:

Q Legend - Ian Brown
Q Idol - Kylie Minogue
Q Icon - Sir Paul McCartney
Q Hero - Anthony H Wilson [Tony Wilson of Factory Records - who calls him Anthony?]
Q Inspiration - Damon Albarn
Q Classic Songwriter - Billy Bragg
Q Classic Song - Stereophonics, Local Boy In The Photograph
Q Classic Album - The Verve, Urban Hymns

What, I wondered on the Victoria Line - having got over my astonishment that two such ephemeral relics as that Verve album and Stereophonics single should be unearthed and garlanded in this way - is the difference between legend, idol, icon, hero and inspiration? What makes Ian Brown eligible for legendary but not iconic status? Why must Sir Paul be content with being an icon and not a classic songwriter? Does the term hero, in this context, implicitly state that the epithee should be an eccentric entrepreneur and emphatically not a left-leaning political folk singer? The odd outstanding acheivement award is easy enough to get one's head around. But such a schools sports day policy towards prizegiving does devalue the thing rather. Perhaps next year they will give a prize simply for being Oasis - recipient: Oasis. Etcetera. Icons, legends, heroes, idols - just try to look surprised.

('Second Opinion', published in the paper edition today - go see it immediately).

Masque of the Red Death
BAC, SW11

LONDON'S critics are united: Punchdrunk's interactive Edgar Allan Poe-inspired adventure in the Battersea Arts Centre left them in various states of dramatic, erotic arousal. The Independent's Paul Taylor confessed himself so turned on by the action he very nearly made a pass at one of the handsome performers; the Standard's own Nicholas de Jongh found himself fearing for the remains of his virtue.

Mine too is a smiling face: Masque of the Red Death, in which audience members don masks to walk unguided through the evocatively transformed gothic corridors, parlours, attics and basements of the BAC, is an LSD trip of a show, a lucid dream you won't want to wake from. I've half a mind to rent a small nook in the building for the remainder of the run.

Taken whole, the show, conceived by the remarkable Felix Barrett, offers an enticing glimpse of a theatrical future - a weird one, in which you may be spirited away by a lovesick waif, locked in a cupboard and fed gingerbread.

But oddly enough, it was one of the most old-fashioned aspects that I found myself most delighted by.

At the centre of the action, if you can find it, is a Victorian vaudeville, where you can remove your mask, drink absinthe and watch the perpetually rolling cabaret of striptease, magic and general silliness, led by a mischievous MC and a splendid little band. Lots of London venues have attempted this kind of thing in recent years, but I have never seen it done with such charming, infectious conviction (I have been humming the song 'When Father Papered the Parlour' ever since).

It's too much to hope Masque of the Red Death will roll on forever - but if Punchdrunk could find a permanent home for it vaudeville of delights, I can think of no better way to spend a Friday night.

* Booking to 12 January (020 7223 2223; www.bac.org.uk)

Here is a short piece on ENO's critically mauled production of Carmen which I wrote for the Evening Standard's new 'Second Opinion' slot. It's not going to make the paper - my 'Second Opinion' being strikingly similar to Fiona Maddock's 'First Opinion' - so I publish it here:

* * * * * * * * * * *

"AWFUL awful awful awful" muttered the gentleman to my left as Alice Coote's Carmen came back to life for the curtain call of ENO's season-opener. From where I was sitting, it was clear that Sally Potter's murky modern staging was no triumph. Clearer still, in the second half - most of the row in front left in the interval.

The Standard's critic, Fiona Maddocks, could only make a squawk of distress when I pressed her for an instant reaction; fortunately for our sub-editors, less fortunately for ENO, she had found words enough for Monday's paper: "No sexual energy, no cigarette factory, no smoke, no castanets, no Seville, no smut, no intensity". The pre-show blogging also came in for some mockery. Ouch.

I too found much that was incoherent and irritating about Potter's staging - I could not understand the decision to set the third act in a motorway service station.

But still, I rather enjoyed it. Shut your eyes, and there was little not to love; conductor Edward Gardner drew a seductive noise from the band (including, incidentally, some excellent castanet playing) while the singing was rich and clear throughout. Coote made the best of her miscasting as Carmen and the chorus was notably fine.

Conceptually? Visually? Well I must own that  Potter's good ideas made me smile more than the bad ones made me groan. At one point in the second act, in Lillas Pastia's neon-lit tranny bar (possibly borrowed from All About My Mother at the Old Vic) Carmen's security guard lover Don Jose is called back to work by a text. The device worked so well in context, it had me scratching my head to remember how Jose receives the message in traditional stagings (trumpets, apparently). The dilemma of the ensuing aria was viscerally felt - a tussle between impetuous abandonment and dull duty that had echoes beyond the immediate setting. I will grant that I felt this doubly given my own recent mobile wranglings and the theme of work weighing heavily on my mind, having spent the previous evening watching George Clooney in Michael Clayton, but generally, short of modern gimmickery, I found the loss of traditional Carmen motifs (fags, gypsies) was balanced by a psychological realism that is rarely effectively conveyed in opera. It may not be what opera - particularly something as elemental as Carmen - is supposed to convey, but it was powerful nonetheless. At least until that tedious third act, when the chasm between what the music says is happening and what the staging says is happening was wide indeed.

As for the Alsatian dog that appeared at the beginning of it and received a warm reception, sentimental fools that opera lovers tend to be, I chose to take him as an animal riff on the horse that Escamillo the toreador traditionally enters on. Again, in context, it fitted in well - and could even tentatively be taken as an acknowledgement that life, for ENO, is a bit of a bitch at the moment.

('A London Life' column from yesterday's paper)

Some time on the night of the 4th September, between curtain up at All About My Mother at the Old Vic and waking up the next morning, I mislaid my mobile phone. Perhaps it fell out of my satchel; perhaps Kevin Spacey pickpocketed me in the crush of the bar; perhaps the stupid thing slipped down the side of the sofa when I slumped home.

Frankly I didn't much care. Blessing in disguise, I thought, relieved to be shot of the demanding little object. Nothing sets me more on edge than receiving a call when one is not wanted: makes me feel furtive and guilty even when I have no cause to be. I have a pathological dread of listening to my voicemail - and a still deeper fear of the vendors at the Carphone Warehouse, who try to push ever flashier models, each one more useless than the last.

Going through life without being interrupted was, initially, delightful. Peace at last. I was forced to such quaint expediencies as using my landline, making proper arrangements and sticking to them, or wandering into the pub on the suspicion that my friends were there (they usually were). Only the discovery that the standard price for a payphone is now 40p(!) tempered my bliss.

I have not died in the intervening four weeks. But the charm of not being bothered is wearing thin, tempered by the discrimination I have been subjected to. With all the attention on MyFace and Spacebook, it's easy to overlook how utterly indispensible the mobile phone has become in modern communication; no one seems able to grasp the fact of not having one. "So whereabouts are you?" I am asked, each time someone calls my home phone.

Finally this weekend, I snapped: having failed to find my friends at an agreed venue I was forced to wander about, vaguely looking for them for 20 minutes before wandering home. A call would have located them in a flash. My girlfriend, meanwhile, is issuing ultimatums, viewing my mobile-free protest as a personal affront. Reluctantly, I shall cave in. I shall go to the police station, decide that I really have been robbed, claim a new model on the insurance and go back to my £40 a month habit.

It's sad. Being a mobile-free Luddite ought to be an honourable protest - after all, the original Luddites went around smashing the first machines of the industrial revolution as they knew that short of making their working lives easier, they would merely render the worker easier to exploit. But when every single person about you has willingly signed up for exploitation - and doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of not being exploited - what can you do but join them? Mine's a Nokia - with a large silent button.

Now pay attention: the link I posted below, which promised some kind of revelation about the new Radiohead album, proved to be a hoax. But a timely hoax: this morning it has been revealed officially that LP7 - In Rainbows, it's called - finally has a release date. And it's sooner than you think!

Here's Murray: "www.radiohead.com is open for business with pre-orders having begun today for their 7th studio album "In Rainbows", which will be available from October 10 as an MP3 download. Also available to pre-order from now is the Discbox, a special edition box-set".

Said box set includes both CD and vinyl versions of the album, plus a bonus disc of extra songs, and will be shipped on the 3rd of December but purchasers will be tided over with the mp3 version of the album. The site is a little cagey about how much these things cost: a bit of clicking back and forth reveals that said Discbox is £40. FORTY POUNDS! Confirmation to all who always thought Yorke (left) and co were thieving capitalist bastards (think back to all those lyrics: "I will stop at nothing"; "we suck young blood"; etc).

But wait! The mp3 only format costs... exactly how much you want it to cost! The site allows you to name your price. Ah, get them - they're nice chaps after all! Apparently LP7 has been finished and lying around for ages; they were merely working out how to release the thing, their contract with EMI having run its course.

Compare and contrast with the Charlatans, who today announced plans to release their next single, You Cross My Path, as a free download. Says manager, Alan McGee: "I thought, 'well, nobody buys CDs anyway'. If you talk to a 19-year old kid, they don't buy CDs... everything is downloaded digitally from the internet for nothing. I came to the conclusion: 'why don't we just give it away for nothing?'".

I suspect there is a simple lesson in economic supply and demand in here somewhere. The Charlatans, dear hearts that they are, no longer have the cachet they once had, hence the decision to 'experiment'. It is hard to imagine this new single of theirs winning them vast swathes of new fans, but the move will at least satisfy those like me, who still find themselves humming A Man Needs to Be Told as they roll out pastry. But its very freeness does rather cheapen the thing artistically as well as monetarily; "It's free?" as I once heard a banker say to a London Paper pusher on his way to buy the Evening Standard (London's Quality Newspaper), "well it can't be any good then".

Radiohead can rest easy in the knowledge that their fans, whose allegiance runs deep, will sign up for the mp3 in droves, donating a token amount to thank the band for their generosity, then blink, sigh, and tentatively part with £40 for solid, slightly exclusive Discbox artefact as well - and, on 3 December, subject that bonus CD to £40 worth of scrutiny. The very expense of the thing immediately makes it a desirable object - rather like a Gucci bag, a badge of your fannish devotion. This all strikes me as an excellent way to release records: practically give away the mp3s - I still can't get used to paying for those ephemeral things - and turn the hard copy into a sort of objet d'art. It's taken Radiohead a split with their major label to take this decision - but I hope it proves to be a pioneering concept.