I watched a BBC4 documentary about Britpop the other day. It’ll be on Youtube if you look for it. There’s loads of documentaries about Britpop, possibly because it was such a recent popular period in music, and possibly because it’s all very simple to explain: UK bands get bored by grunge, look back to the 60′s, make great songs, get coke bloat and collapse in on themselves.

However, it ended with One Very Important Thought: that trailblazing Britpop wonders like Suede, Blur and Pulp ultimately didn’t affect music much at all – the bands that traded in inane, emotion-lite …

I always thought that being called ‘pretentious’ would be one of the worst labels you could pin to a band, with the image Über-punchable, po-faced, saint-wannabe Bono popping readily to mind. So when ‘unpretentious’ was the first word that I leant towards when describing today’s new band, Record Hop, I was sure that I was on safe, appreciative ground.

But think about it – ‘unpretentious’ would be unfair: the word smacks of earnest trad-rock lumps who, you know, maaan, ‘just make music we like, and if anyone else likes it, well, that’s a bonus, yeah?’.

Well, Record Hop aren’t …