Latest releases reviewed

VARIOUS  Punk: Attitude  Fremantle  *****

There's definitive and then there's this. Don Letts, DJ and musician, armed himself with a Super 8 during the giddy punk years of the late 1970s, and here he revisits the footage and the people captured on it to attempt a who, why and where of a musical movement. Expertly tying together the strands of US and British punk, Letts forensically examines this so-called counterculture and explains how it continues to bleed into other arts forms. As good as the archive footage is, what fascinates here are the present-day interviews with (among others) Jello Biafra, David Johansen, Chrissie Hynde, Mick Jones and Henry Rollins. Spread over two discs, the second part contains a series of featurettes which look at how fanzines, fashion, record companies, women and culture in general were changed by the music. The past, present and future of punk is all here. It's everything you always wanted to know, presented in an intelligent and coherent fashion. This is brilliant. Buy it. Brian Boyd

MAROON 5 Friday the 13th Sony/BMG  **

Maroon 5 are one of the biggest US success stories of the past three years - their debut album is sitting tight and pretty in eight million homes around the world. To celebrate this, the stultifyingly nice American band return to their home city, a big venue, and an even bigger sense of occasion. While the soft rock funk/soul/ pop music is nothing to phone home about (it's true, eight million people can be wrong), the concert footage is nonetheless expertly filmed: lots of swirling whites-of-the-eye camera action segues into slo-mo close ups of Adam Levine, lead singer and object of teenage girl affection. Extras are dull, little more than a photo gallery; the biggest, daftest surprise is in the concert footage, in which the gentle boys try to swagger through Oasis's Hello, and fail. Tony Clayton-Lea