If you’re in Manchester, go and see SBTRKT at Albert Hall.

If you’re in London, go and see Strand Of Oaks at The Lexington.

If you’re in Southampton, go and see Syd Arthur at the Joiners Arms.

If you’re in Edinburgh, go and see Allah-Las at the Electric Circus.

But if you wanna stay home, tonight’s TV schedule offers up The Driver, The Leftovers and My £999 Wedding.

That’s yer lot for today. Thanks for reading. Same time same place tomorrow, yeah? Oh, go on.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the TV shows that refuse to die. But we neglected to mention the positively jurassic Never Mind The Buzzcocks, which began its 28th series last night (it debuted way back in 1996, when jokes about rockers getting blowjobs from groupies were apparently still funny). After years of guest presenters, the programme has finally settled on a permanent host. And surprise surprise, it’s another waspish, middle-aged white bloke.

To be fair, the bespoke opening sequence about Rhod Gilbert’s first day on the job was mildly amusing.

But after that, it was like Mark Lamarr never left. In a bad way.

Female guests still get unduly bullied, insecure young pop hopefuls still get unduly bullied, the lineup round is still an excuse to humiliate people whose pop careers didn’t turn out quite like they hoped and/or who look a bit funny and 80% of the jokes are rubbish innuendoes about old rockers’ penchant for drugs and kinky sex. And Noel just looks sad.

It’s only barely operating above the level of Dapper Laughs, who immediately followed on ITV2. What a depressing night of “comedy”. Bantz must die.

Earlier today, we declared a pop video twerking moratorium. But new Mute signing Arca didn’t listen. Arty this effort may be, but it’s still bum waggling at the end of the day.

Thankfully, Pharrell’s wondrous new video for It Girl is a twerk-free zone. Created by Japanese artists Takashi Murakami and Fantasista Utamaro, it squeezes 30 years of Japanese anime, videogame and pop visual tropes into five retina-popping minutes.

2014 is nearly three-quarters done, which means it’s time for another of our quarterly Spotify playlists, rounding up all the Guide’s tracks of the week from the last three months, plus a few bangers from other artists we’ve featured in that period. You’re very welcome.

(Here’s a link if you can’t get the embed to work)

Getting a kids choir to reinterpret pop songs isn’t a new idea. But getting controversial artist and plastic toy-mangler Dinos Chapman to remix their efforts and provide accompanying artwork probably is. Anyway, here’s Dinos remixing the Capital Children’s Choir’s version of Crystal Castles’ Untrust Us in suitably eerie fashion.

This is what it sounds like unremixed:

And if you can’t get enough of youth choirs covering potentially unsuitably adult pop songs, here are some older examples to fuel your strange perversion.

Between them, Robbie Williams and Avicii are responsible for some of the most irritating songs of all-time. What fresh hell can they summon up when their capacity for inflicting terrible sonic pain is combined? Well the answer is below – dare you to listen.

Actually, it’s not so horrific is it? I mean it’s dross, obviously, but it’s not going to aurally scar you for life like Rock DJ or Oh Brother. Perhaps their evil powers cancelled each other out. I’m actually slightly disappointed.

Here’s a stylish if somewhat pretentious short film by artist/designer Aitor Throup, featuring Swedish actor Noomi Rapace and with a soundtrack by Flying Lotus. It shows Throup painstakingly making a mesh figurine of Noomi’s body. Or, if you prefer:

The film not only depicts a three-dimensional portrait of Rapace being intricately sculpted but also acts as a portrait of her by acting as a metaphor for the various chronological steps in the actor’s process.

A couple of new albums to brighten your Tuesday. First up, ahead of his appearance in the Guide on Saturday, Caribou’s uplifting Our Love album is streaming now on iTunes.

Meanwhile, hip-hop old hand MF DOOM has teamed up with young buck Bishop Nehru as NehruvianDOOM. Their album of satisfyingly chewy boom-bap is streaming here.

In more Minaj-related news, Mastodon have attempted to outdo the wobbling arse count in Nicki’s Anaconda video with their promo for The Motherload.

Is it a clever inversion of the trend to have women twerking to metal? Or just a flimsy excuse for unnecessary female objectification creeping back into the rock video? Either way, I think we’ve reached peak twerk. Enough.

Nicki Minaj has been unveiled as the host of the 2015 EMAs, taking place in Glasgow on November 9. The question being: is Nicki’s Glaswegian accent anywhere near as good as her Essex?

The first trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s highly anticipated adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is out, and it looks like a lot of fun.

Some things we noticed about Joaquin Phoenix’s lead role as pothead PI Doc Sportello:

Joaquin is rocking some bold facial hair again: shaggy beard for I’m Still Here, tidy tache for Her and now a mighty pair of mutton chops.

He deliberately curls his hair like Bradley Cooper in American Hustle.

Then, when interrogating Owen Wilson, he wears his hair in a currently voguish man-bun.

And finally he goes straight and gets his hair cut – but keeps the sideys!

BBT has penned a more sensible analysis of the trailer right here.

Morning all. Well darn my satchel and knit me a cardigan, twee faves Belle & Sebastian are back with their first album in four years. It’s called Girls In Peacetime Want to Dance and it’ll be released on Matador in Jan 2015. As you can see from the trailer below, the band’s one concession to the modern world is employing a “a hip-hop producer” – but Ben H Allen isn’t exactly Dr Dre, he just happens to have worked with Gnarls Barkley once and is better known for producing recent albums by Bombay Bicycle Club and Animal Collective. So business as usual, really.