Stephen Wiltshire is a British artist with an amazing gift. He can eyeball the moxt complex cityscapes and draw them from memory with amazing detail and in almost perfect scale. His panoramic hand-rendering of Tokyo is just hair raising when you realize it was all done from his photographic memory. It’s really no wonder he’s dubbed “The Human Camera”.

This is only the second Coldplay record I have in my possession. Someone gifted me the sappy, moody but not-really-that-bad Parachutes album many years ago, and I bought Viva La Vida, Or Death and All His Friends because the cover invoked a bizarre feeling of optimism in me. Even more bizarrely, I also bought it, despite not really liking Coldplay, because I wanted to see if there was any new musical reason to like Chris Martin and Co.

Sadly, I have to say that they still sound like they want to be U2. The guitars sound like a homage to The Edge, and the epic atmospherics of the album sound very Joshua Tree-like. They have Brian Eno as a producer which probably doesn’t help. I’m sure there are definitely U2 fans out there who dig Coldplay but I obviously am not one of them.

My theory is that Coldplay figured that since they were incapable of rivaling the cutting edge Radiohead stuff, they might as well try and fill be the biggest stadium rock band mould created by U2.

As a consolation, thanks to Coldplay’s massive fan base, at least I know I can get a good price at Cash Converters for this CD next week.

Match Day Football Programmes is a collection of match day programmes from the golden era of British football (before all the commercialism, professionalism and all that) published by Fuel Design. It features English league (and a few non-league) clubs from 1945 to 1991. At £18 a piece, this pocket sized book is an excellent window into the simpler (albeit amateur) days of the beautiful game.

Very nice photography for British Airways but what’s the point when BA’s staff can’t hold their shit together, eh? But great photography nonetheless from a team of about five photographers — see the other images here.

A true case of being lost in translation. An error of this magnitude must be both laughable and infuriating.

Aston Martin is building a brand new, super-exclusive coupe codenamed One-77. There are a number of ‘leaked’ renderings of the car flying around and it looks bloody sweet. Well, it better look sweet because it is reportedly going to sell for about £1.2M when its launched. They are also only going to build about 70 odd units of this car, which is a smart move because the number of affluent investment bankers still in a job has significantly dwindled in recent months

Realising their miserable failure as indie rockers, the now defunct Simian branched out sideways into the dance side of the indie spectrum as Simian Mobile Disco. Their 2007 release Attack Decay Sustain Release is a collection of mostly punchy, light and hook-laden dance tracks. Given their rock roots, this is admittedly rather effete dance music fare but you won’t really care or notice once you get into it.

Simian Mobile Disco are actually in town and will be playing at Zouk tonight. It’s probably going to be an awesome set and, unless you are pregnant or otherwise limited in mobility, you really have no excuse not to be there tonight.

Nick Franglen and Fred Deakin (aka Lemon Jelly) released their full debut album, LemonJelly.ky in 2001. It was both a commercial and critical success, and if you listened to the album, you’d know why. With the warm, organic beats and weird, psychedelic synths, this album will just make you happy. Very happy and quite bouncy all day long; go give it a listen it if you haven’t yet!

You could say that if Definitely Maybe was their Stone Roses, Dig Out Your Soul is their Second Coming. It won’t win them any new fans, but those that believed the truth last time will dig this.

›› The Observer reviews the new Oasis album

With all the money they made, I suppose the Arctic Monkeys‘ Alex Turner could do whatever the hell he felt like doing. And so maybe he decided to gang up with his friend Miles Kane, start a side project called The Last Shadow Puppets and release a ballsy and ambitious album titled Age of the Understatement that would pay homage and draw inspiration from retro ‘orchestral’ pop music.

Despite the arrangements sounding somewhat familiar (maybe nostalgic is the right word here), the sweeping strings, fulsome percussions and great energy make this a very, very good album. Already I am thinking this should be one of the best albums of the year.

Radiohead. “Reckoner”. Remix.

Kowalski was the first single from Primal Scream’s very compelling 1997 release, Vanishing Point. Breaking away from whatever they had done before, this single was a disturbing blend of industrial dub, samples from the (pointless) 1971 movie Vanishing Point and Bobby Gillespie muttering weird nothings.

And it sounded great. The Automator mix was wicked and I was so very captivated by the cover art. In fact, the Primal Scream sleeve art from Vanishing Point, Echo Dek and XTRMNTR (and the singles they spawned) were a definite source of stimulus for me back then as an aspiring designer.

Referencing almost everything from old-skool hip-hop to big beat electronica, the Freestylers unleashed the exhilarating and fun filled We Rock Hard in 1998. They sampled, cut, pillaged, mashed up and repackaged classics (from the likes of Kraftwerk, Public Enemy and James Brown) and created a sound that can be best described as being more diverse than original.

It’s an album that won’t please the crate digging purists and won’t be accessible to the casual listener. But there are enough of us in between those extremes who will really enjoy this decade old classic.

Orbital’s seminal brown album from 1993 was my first real electronic music purchase 15 years ago. Despite the test of time, my CD has held up and the music has more than just held up. Anyone who grew up in the 90s would have heard the outstanding Halcyon + On + On on some movie soundtrack or the album is just like that track — brilliant, mesmerising and absolutely timeless.