Here’s an opening line you don’t often read in music articles: Statisticians, please skip a few paragraphs right now, because you’ll already know this bit. For the rest of us whose uselessness with numbers is in direct relation to the length of the angry queue that forms as we struggle with a handful of coins to pay for the newspaper, read on.

So here’s a statistical fact – if you are in a room with 22 other people, there’s more than a 50% likelihood that two of them share the same birthday. No, I don’t really understand either. For …

I’ve got to the age where all of your friends start to get married. At the weekend, I’m going to my third one this year. There was supposed to be a fourth, but the bride and groom-to-be got stroppy and split up. Once my initial disappointment at the vanished possibility of a free bar subsided, I was actually quietly pleased. Three weddings in one year is exhausting enough. God knows what it’s like for the bride and groom themselves (and that sentence, I’ve just realised, works both as a rhetorical musing and a statement).

From what I’ve seen this year, …

Almost astonishingly, today we publish the 100th band to appear on A New Band A Day. A Centenary! A Double Golden Jubilee! This is a (very) minor achievement of sorts, considering my attention span is comparable with that of the proverbial goldfish, and the transient nature of the Tubular Interwebs. However, it’s a happy occasion I suppose, even though I didn’t receive a telegram from the Queen.

Like truculent teenagers though, we don’t want to celebrate this too much, and would prefer to remain sulkily opposed to convention, whilst secretly longing for participation in it. Thus, Today’s new band …

That’s right folks, this week’s borderline-awful ROADTRIP! gimmick is drawing to a close. And yet, for all its conceptual craptitude, we’ve dug up a lot of ace bands so far on our virtually-drunken, imaginarily-debauched trundle around Northern Europe. Sweden’s Envelopes, Norway’s Hiawata! and Poland’s MR BEEP have provided us with a ADHD-fat-kid-in-an-ice-cream-parlour sample of Upper-Euro music, and brilliant it all has been too.

Thus, before we head back to Cyber-Calais (Yes, this is getting tedious now), for the ferry, we’ve stopped in France for one final hurrah, and look who’s Today’s New Band – it’s Facteur! Now, as …

What is it about French dance music that makes it so distinctive? No-one does ‘funky’ in dance music like the French – perhaps it’s all the fine food, fine wine and fine weather they have there. It’s hard to imagine a band as sullen as Joy Division emerging from a country where you can visit the Loire Valley for a smashing sunshine top-up. On the other hand, when you hear the songs that today’s new band Teenage Bad Girl make, it’s easy to understand that they haven’t felt the crushing despair of living in Macclesfield like Ian Curtis. They just …