Remember when Radiohead were just a classic rock band?

No, I’d forgotten too – but there it was, plain as day, when The Bends shuffled onto my iPod (is using one considered retro yet?). The slick, wide, guitar sound is there. A four-square rock structures all the songs. The lyrics are tangible, comprehensible, forward. It’s classic rock, all right.

The Bends offers no hint of the genre-busting right turn they would take over the course of their next three albums. The Bends‘ big, beautiful rock could just as easily be an album by a band who were about to morph…

Constantly searching for new bands leaves you strangely myopic.

Tunnel vision develops insidiously and subtly, until one day you realise that the only bands who will spark your synapses any more are the most obscure, defiant and truly gauche; the bands for whom melody is a dispensable luxury and strange noise-making is all that counts.

These bands are all well and good – and in fact, they might well be my favourites – but focussing on one small niche of anything is a crime against balance. Too much of anything is a bad thing. (With the exception of peanut butter…

Arrrghh! Couldn’t… resist… today’s… band… because… of… vague… punning…

It’s a sorry state of affairs. I’ll apologise right now. But why even try to put up any defence any more? I’m loud and proud about it now: I just love rubbish puns, and Godzilla Black have a song called Fear of a Flat Planet.

A frankly crummy half-pun, yes, but also one that conjures images of a world made entirely of still-boxed IKEA furniture, with cardboard cut-outs of Chuck D and Terminator X (Flava Flav is already a cardboard cut-out) shouting angrily at all and sundry.

You can tell…

All music recycles the past – it has to in order to generate new ideas, just like any other art form. But it’s safe to say that, within the realms of guitar music at least, this retrospective thievery has become the ends and not the means.

‘So what?’, you might say. But when bands steal ideas, attitudes or sounds from the past and fail to add their own splash of colour to the mix, then we’re all being short-changed, and the bands become, essentially, tribute acts.

And if I want tribute act, I’ll brave the onslaught of weak puns and …

I knew something didn’t add up. The BBC 6Music kerfuffle drags on and on – with more and more music fans, politicians and BBC bigwigs all competing to see who can yelp their opinions the loudest.

And yet, all along, something just didn’t seem right. How could the BBC continue to make slack-jawed idiot-vision programmes like I Believe In Ghosts: Joe Swash and Hotter Than My Daughter, whilst cutting 6Music because of budgetary constraints?

The truth is now pretty much out: the BBC has been toying with 6Music’s fate as part of some tedious, wider,…

So, I’ve finally sent a slightly embarrassing and uptight email to the BBC complaining about the bizarre (and I suspect, politically motivated) decision to axe of BBC 6Music.

If, like me, you’re a listener (and can put aside the temptation to let it disappear just so Lauren Laverne’s show will vanish as well) and value the station’s admirable adherence to playing something different, why not email them too?

That idea of playing something different is key: it is why you’re reading this blog, why your idea of hell is a U2 concert, and it’s what separates…

Last night I met a man in a bar who really likes Morrissey. There are bands that I really like – for example: by a combination of accident and desire, I’ve seen loveable scamps Art Brut a moderately unhealthy seven or eight times.

Which, it turns out, is nothing. This man has managed to take the concept of ‘to like’, folded it like the most intricate origami you’ve ever seen, and then carefully unfurled a razor-edged, pristine paper statuette that reads “MY OVERWHELMING OBSESSION“.

There was nothing sinister about his infatuation with Manchester’s favourite miserablist, just plain old hero worship;…

There’s a tiny town to the north-east of Paris called Peronne.

It’s in the Somme, so it rains a lot, and both the buildings and surrounding countryside are deeply gashed with marks from the two terrible world wars that were fought there.

To the French, the town may not mean a lot. It’s certainly insignificant compared to the great hulking city of Paris just a few kilometres away.

But to me it’s vital – a beautiful town with history; a town with the best Patisseries I’ve ever had the pleasure of repeatedly gorging myself in; a town…

We all have our curious nooks, fascination with niches, our inexplicable preferences and the feeling of being unfathomably drawn to subject X over subject Y.

So I’ll come right out and admit it, using a truly tortuous metaphor: if Broken Deer was a magnet, I’d be the spilt iron filings bristling all over it, irremovable, fascinated and twitching.

Broken Deer’s music bypasses both the rational lobe of the brain and the musical one, and connects directly with the bit that makes me recoil with satisfaction, pleasure and a beguiling, bizarre sense of comfort.

Broken Deer // White Woman

Found sounds…

Whenever I see another of Lady Gaga’s increasingly out-there stage shows or videos, two thoughts cut through the sick green fug in  my mind.

The first one is usually incredulity that the public at large have accepted a pop star who is just so determinedly outré; and secondly, I wonder just how hard Fischerspooner must be kicking themselves, having pioneered the same camp-electro/showtime/weirdness shtick about ten years ago.

Fischerspooner knew they were ahead of the game, and had the misfortune of watching paler imitations emerge (geddit!?!) and attain the kind of success they deserved as Electro became…