The name means `I will please', and Placebo have done so far. Now for that difficult second album.

How to escape the shadow of grunge? Why, rediscover Allen Ginsberg, of course! Nick Hasted howls along with Sonic Youth

James Young, of Scottish outfit Ganger, has ambition. He wants to write the Tour de France theme tune. He wants to supply mad, loud music for TV adverts (though he'd probably suggest that they use Slint's "Good Morning Captain" first) and he wants to play US arenas supporting the likes of Sonic Youth and Nine Inch Nails (both of whom he's been told like the tough Ganger sound).

Mark Eitzel's reputation as the Leonard Cohen of his generation remains unthreatened on Caught in a Trap and I Can't Back Out 'Cause I Love You Too Much, Baby, a mostly solo, acoustic album. Yo La Tengo's James McNew and Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley add bass and drums respectively to four tracks, and former Cramps guitarist Kid Congo Powers scrawls expressionist sheets of fractured guitar noise over three, but otherwise the absence of colluding musicians leaves Eitzel even more bereft than ever, adrift upon the whims of his misery.

Long before Supergrass and Super Furry Animals made it big, North Carolina's Superchunk were leading the way, says Tim Perry

DA Pennebaker chronicled the Sixties with his legendary rockumentaries. Dennis Lim caught up with him in New York

They come from Atlanta, Georgia... or do they? They say they are space aliens, but they sound like the mutant grandchildren of Dick Dale. Tim Perry makes contact with Man or Astro Man?

Fascist Regime

Christopher Taylor's life was clean and ordered - then he moved in with his girlfriend...

Why am I outside Buckingham Palace at 6.30 in the morning, wearing a Walkman and dancing to the Rolling Stones? If my on / off ex could see me, he'd say it's because I think my life is a movie. I do a little high kick. A soldier in a green beret eyes me nervously. I tell the soldier that I'm listening to "Happy" - "It's one of the few tracks that Keef sang on", as if that explains everything. Not quite. At what point did I decide I hated the people I invited back to my flat so much that I threw myself out and came stomping past Victoria tube to complain to the Queen?

When Sonic Youth come to town, you discover who your friends are. As you try to get someone to accompany you to the band's first London show in three years, you realise that everybody is either washing their hair, mucking out the budgie or flossing their toes. You can sympathise. At the end of last Wednesday's show, you expected to be handed a certificate - "I survived Sonic Youth," perhaps. It wasn't so much a gig as an art exhibition with guitar feedback.

today

ROCK SHE WROTE ed Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers, Plexus pounds 12.99

With minutes to go before Garbage took the stage for their first ever UK show, a flustered student was haggling with a ticket tout in the street outside. "Thirty quid?" the lad repeated, aghast. "I paid half that for David Bowie!" The barrel-necked tout leaned back on his heels, cold as a cadaver. "Yeh, but Bowie was crap," he said. "This is Garbage."