Man, TV is just getting crazy. I love it.

Who would’ve ever thought that Alex James from Blur would be singing Opera on a reality TV show with Meatloaf as the judge???

2009 was an amazing year seeing the reformation of Blur, and now they are celebrating a cinema release early in 2010 titled No Distance Left To Run. Global cinema release dates are on their way…

Filmed throughout the band’s 2009 rehearsals and acclaimed summer tour, No Distance Left To Run finds all 4 members of blur together for the first time in 9 years. It was directed by by 32 (Dylan Southern & Will Lovelace, who also directed Franz Ferdinand’s clip for Ulysses).

With previously unseen archive material alongside new interviews and reportage, the film recounts the highs and lows of THE essential Britpop band from the late 80’s to their headline return at Glastonbury and Hyde Park this year. The result is a musing on Englishness and identity, a portrait of friendship and resolution, and a whole lot of crowdsurfing.

Here’s the trailer which reminds me how much I loved them:

And Damon has a long chat with the Guardian well worth listening to as well.

I hope that’s not the end of it!

Ohhhh and listen out for an announcement of a Gorillaz album and title!

How did it come to this? Ten short years ago I was dancing to TLC’s No Scrubs (judge ye not!) on Manly Beach for the countdown to *gasp* The Millennium.

Suddenly, we’re at the other end of the decade, and we never did work out what to call ‘00-10… “The Noughties” didn’t really cut it. We’d better come up with something quick sticks, because the tunes from the last ten years have been incredible and future generations are going to need to refer to us somehow…

NME’s Top 100 albums of the last decade has some mean contributions, not the least of which is the man of the hour Emperor Luke Steele’s early effort, Lovers from The Sleepy Jackson. The Empire defining epochs, even way back when!

Other EMI faves from the list you can regularly hear blasting around the office are below:

One very notable absence however… WHERE IS THE DAFT PUNK!?!?

Whilst we greatly respect NME’s all-seeing UK hipster stylings, stay tuned for The In Sound’s very own and very wise Best Of 2009 album list – coming soon to a browser near you!

Combine the collect-ability of album artwork and postage stamps, and tadaaaa, we give you the ultimate Collector breakdown material. Granted, 34×32mm is a far cry from 12″ vinyl artwork, but the stamp versions are a whole lot cheaper (for the moment).

In 2010, Royal Mail will release the Classic Album Covers series as a follow-up to 2009’s British Design Classics. The final ten selected sleeves were picked from by the editors of three of the UK’s most influential music publications together with a number of graphic designers and design writers.

The series features sleeve artwork from 1960 onwards: Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell, Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood To The Head, Blur’s Parklife, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, The Clash’s London Calling, Led Zeppelin IV, New Order’s Power, Corruption, & Lies, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, The Rolling Stones Let It Bleed, and Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells.

Check out Norvic Philatelics for more. They’ve even made a introduction for us muso’s who are brand new to stamp collecting. Bless their souls!