Having intended to spend my time at The Great Escape in one fashion (ice cream on the delightful beach, beers in the delightful pubs, bands in the delightful venues), I ended up spending it slightly differently: missing all the bands I intended to see, studiously avoiding all cone-holstered gelato desserts, and accidentally DJing at the excellent Recommender-run Blogger Meet Up.

Planning what to do at a music festival is foolish in the extreme, and going with the flow is the only real course of action.

Besides, if I’d followed a plan, I’d never have caught the bewildering, fascinating, confusing …

For the next few days, ANBAD is pressing clammy flesh against clammy flesh at The Great Escape, the UK’s premiere new music conference/festival/beano-by-the-sea.

There are more bands than one could possibly hope to see, including ANBAD favourites Mmoths, D/R/U/G/S, Beth Jeans Houghton, and so many more that even Hype Machine had to create a special page to list all the recommended ones.

In tribute, Alex James, cheese connoisseur and official ANBAD pourer of Molten Yellow Love, gets to grips with Dickie Attenborough’s classic movie Brighton Rock.

MIXTAPE:

FIRST! Le Common Diamond are everything you want out of …

There’s no way to convey this gently, so bluntness will have to do: you’re too old, already.

No really, you are. You feel old. Feel it.

Feel that slight discomfort in your hips? It isn’t a one-off niggle you picked up by walking in new shoes – it won’t go away, ever. And it’s just going to get worse. Really.

My own hideous elderliness was highlighted with ruthless efficiency upon the discovery of Kiran Leonard, a boy from Oldham who is 16, and writes song with a brutal understanding of life, its mysterious ways and how to cram it …

“We dig repetition”, sang Mark E Smith in The Fall’s Repetition. And then he sang it again, just to make a meta-point.

That point, of course, is that repetition is utterly essential in music, and it’s why the most basic of house music is also the most effective; the brain latching onto quickly looping snippets and wandering to the rhythmic hinterland.

White Collar Boy, like many music makers overwhelmed with the vast, unending choice of sounds and instruments laid out before them, have latched onto this repetitive simplicity as his musical lifeboat.

They have produced, in Long Walk Home, …

Some artists must accept from their very inception that they will never have a number one record. I like those bands.

Some artists must also accept that they will never exceed ‘cult status’ – that quasi-mythical state where everyone cool says they like your music, but rarely actually buys it. I like those bands even more.

Now, I’m not guaranteeing that Aeirs TV will garner cult status.

I’m not even guaranteeing that  his astonishingly dense, blunt, pulsing techno would cause people to memorise song titles and casually drop them into chin-stroking pub conversations.

I merely hope this will be the …

As ANBAD continues its plunge into the dizzying depths of John Peel’s record collection, one is reminded that Alex James was once a member of a band who were deemed brilliant enough to actually record a John Peel session at Peel Acres itself.

Blur’s musical output never hinted of days to come when certain band members would be reduced to flogging ASDA cheese – in effect, pouring molten cheese-shame onto the great John Peel himself.

Sigh. At least they both look happy about it.

Mixtape:

FIRST! Red Cosmos may have made one of the most wilfully obtuse, …

Occasionally unforeseen events pricks your inflated sense of self-worth, and today’s covert prickle arrived in the form of John Peel’s LP archive being released onto an unsuspecting internet.

Anyone with even the vaguest interest in new music will get lost for hours in Peel’s virtual shelving units, and doing so serves as a reminder of the great man’s obsessive dedication to discovering, hoarding and sharing new music in a pre-music blog, pre-Pitchfork, pre-Hype Machine era.

For a long time, John Peel was new music discovery. Now we are all at it, with varying degrees of success – but he was the first, and …