When I was in France, while the Tour de France was snaking its sweaty, wild-eyed way through the countryside, my tent was pitched high on a hill, which in turn was overlooked by Mont Ventoux. It’s a huge, imposing lump of a mountain, undulating, steep and bereft of trees and other life near the summit. The penultimate stage of the Tour finished on the top of it, where presumably the riders fell straight off their bikes into a huge heap of cramping limbs and destroyed will.

In the next tent was a crazy Norwegian. Most Norwegians are slightly crazy, in …

Today’s New Band might well garner tons of critical acclaim – and worse, may be burdened with being flavour-of-the-month cool. It’d be a shame, because Gold Panda makes music that deserves to end up in better places than an audio montage on Skins.

Making music from bits and pieces of other things is nothing new, but most attempts just serve to reveal the lack of artistry on the part of the composer, leaving us with ham-fisted cobbled-together mental chewing gum. Gold Panda, however, has got it right.

In Long Vacation, vividly hear a song so infused with the …

This morning I rang my best friend, who lives in New Zealand. Like passenger jets, inter-continental telecommunication is one of those astonishing human achievements that we all use and all take for granted. Years of human endeavour and ingenuity, from the discovery of electricity until the launch of Sputnik, made it possible for me to yap inanely to the other side of the globe.

And how did my friend and I use this mind-boggling facility, this symbol of the capabilities of the mind at its most creatively brilliant? We talked about women and football, just like we did when we …

Unresearched Glib Pop Music Theory #235680: the act of hearing music has a closer resemblance to the act of smelling than any other sense. Perhaps this seemingly ludicrous claim should be qualified a little. Smell is almost indescribable in any terms other than other smells. Wines, for example, smell of freshly mown lawns, tarmac melting on hot days and hedgerow blossoms.

Melted chocolate smells wonderful because it smells of melted chocolate. It’s self-referential. So is music, cutting, as it does, to the pin-prick centre of your mind/heart/soul – wherever you feel like your most base feelings are housed.

I …

If you’re one of ANBAD‘s many non-UK readers, you may not have experienced the mysterious joys of premiere surface-cleaning product Cillit Bang, and it’s bizarrely seductive Lord, Master and Prophet, the perma-yelling Barry Scott. If you’re none the wiser, initiate yourself into the strangely alluring world of Barry here - and then consider this: without the unusual SEMI-THREATENING SPEAKING-IN-CAPITAL-LETTERS tactic deployed by the quasi-benevolent Barry, Cillit Bang would just be another product on the shelves. Barry has bellowed down the opposition and now Cillit Bang sits amongst the homecare Gods.

Like any product now, music is branded …

In the mornings, whilst I’m shoveling yoghurt, museli and toast into my flapping mouth, I need to watch TV to to kick-start my addled brain. The only real option outside of the dull and worthy news channels is GMTV, which is the televisual equivalent of reading the Daily Mail whilst eating a full ENGLISH breakfast and complaining loudly about IMMIGRANTS and IT WASN’T LIKE THIS IN THE OLD DAYS.

This morning I wasn’t able to perform my usual trick of phasing out all the moronic elements of GMTV, treating it purely as a mass of moving colours and shapes, …

Pitchfork, the music review website that is both pleasingly with it and, occasionally, maddeningly snobbish all at once, recently published a review of five re-issued versions of New Order‘s albums. It’s a review which, for once, succinctly captures exactly what was so wonderful about them.

In contrast to The Charlatans (see yesterday’s post) who failed to gain heroic status despite years of straining, New Order leapt there instantly without, seemingly, either trying or wanting to be there. I can’t think of many bands who were so delightfully haphazard, arty and contrary, without any of those qualities being excruciatingly embarrassing. …

There was a girl who I met at art college. Her name was Laura, and she managed to be both swaggeringly masculine (her haircut, her demeanour, her clothes) and sweetly feminine (big coy brown eyes, cute cheekbones and pink lips) all at once. One of the things that I remember the most is that she told me that her favourite band of all time – of all time – was The Charlatans.

The Charlatans are a strange lot. They’re one of those bands that nearly attained greatness, but never quite got there. From their baggy roots, through their middle …

I’m jealous of Today’s New Band. They’re from San Francisco. I spent a month in San Francisco a couple of years ago and I’d happily give my eye teeth to go back to there RIGHT NOW. San Francisco is one of those cities where all of the things you’ve heard, and all of the things you haven’t heard about it are true, and very visible. I was repeatedly told that it was ‘very European’, but it wasn’t in the slightest.

It wasn’t even American. It was its own, eye-rattlingly strange, determinedly varied world, packed full of crazies, stoners and professional …