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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

February went fast didn’t it? It’s almost as if it was shorter than the other months or something.

Inevitably, the great new bands intruded our lives thick and fast, and here is a 15 minute radio-riffic celebration of February’s Five Best New Bands:

ANBAD RADIO SHOW // February’s Top Five New Bands

And here’s the links to the bands mentioned in the show:

Martial Arts // Something Beginning With L // Memo // Broken Deer // Scary Mansion

And…

In this scathing View From feature, fabulously-be-named North-East Londoner Massimo Zepettelli bemoans the local new music vacuum, and suggests how things could (and should) change for the better…

London. One of the most thriving cities in the world for music and all kinds of culture. Many (rightly) presume there to be somewhere to enjoy live music in all geographical corners of the capital.

Sorry, not North East London: Seven Sisters, Tottenham Hale, Blackhorse Road, Walthamstow, Leytonstone, Snaresbrook and South Woodford. Nothing is near any of…