Cardiff is a fundamentally strange place. A capitol city with a small-town mindset. Beautiful buildings side-by-side with deeply ugly, crumbling counterparts. Money sluicing into some areas, and cruelly meandering away from others.

No, there’s nothing too unusual about these circumstances. But Cardiff’s small size magnifies these effects, and it’s the first I mentioned that has the greatest impact. It’s an important place, and yet for many, it’s simply their local town, where they pop into on Saturday to buy sausages. Mmm, sausages.

Anyway – the result is a music scene that is dynamic, fractured and outward-looking, and yet marked with a homely feel. I’m aways expecting a New Wave Of Country and Western to emerge from there.

Until that happens, here’s Cardiff’s Lucky Delucci, typically fulfilling their requirements: gentle Euros Childs-esque folk cross-faded with staccato drums; the Tweecore golden duo of glockenspiels ‘n’ strings pushing up against something a bit more… grand.

Lucky Delucci // December 1986

By twinning these two sensibilities of old and new, Lucky Delucci fulfil Cardiff’s unspoken remit: thrusting forward to the future yet pandering to the past. In the tedious world of town planning, this approach might stultify; in the shimmering world of shiny pop music, it works, if you can do it.

Lucky Delucci can. Sweet, cunning, and gazing hungrily over the horizon. Or at least Cardiff Bay.

www.myspace.com/luckydelucci