Heroes are peculiarly individual. One man’s hero may be another’s whatever. But what happens when you meet your hero? Furthermore, what happens if you not only meet him, but play a one-off, once-in-a-lifetime, special-event gig with him?

Such existential quandaries were manfully shrugged off by Louis Barabbas of Louis Barabbas & The Bedlam Six when he arranged for his hero, inspiration and high priest of pop peculiarity, John Otway to join the band’s EP launch extravaganza.

Picking a man who bills himself as ‘Rock and Roll’s greatest failure’ as a role model may seem counter-intuitive, but the truth is …

The World Cup is one week away. One week! I’m so excited about the World Cup that I’m beyond the joyful constant-vibration stage and well into the much darker, more worrying “buy any associated merchandise within grabbing distance” phase.

The best thing about the World Cup – after the football itself – is the crud that surrounds it.

Crud like this tie-in dirge-song, which, astonishingly, is Serbia’s official World Cup anthem. Or maybe more grouchy, neurotic and home-spun crud like this surprisingly risible effort by Mark E. Smith from The Fall. This kind of hit-and-hope tosh clings magnetically to …

Good old Liam Gallagher. He never lets us down. It was always pretty obvious that behind the mad-fer-it hoolie swagger there was a fruitcake mind. One who will still be prancing around on stage when he’s 70. One who is capable of reforming Oasis as Beady Eye.

1908, though, knocks Liam’s barminess into a cocked hat. 1908 is beyond nuts, beyond any definition of ‘normal’.

Take Music For Harold To Eat Houses By. No, please. It’s frantically, skin-crawlingly, eye-scratchingly INSANE. If you plugged a 3.5 mm jack into Jeffrey Dahmer’s head, and recorded the results – …

People will tell you that, when writing, never use an exclamation mark if you want humour to be taken seriously. People are stupid.

Because if one band ever cried out for an exclamation mark, it’s Ball Of Flame Shoot Fire. Perhaps agonising over the punctuation of a band’s name is endlessly petty, or, frankly, autistic – or both – but there, I’ve said it: Ball Of Flame Shoot Fire! is just better.

But then if you’re a band that writes songs as frolicking and carefree as Patience, punctuation becomes moot.

Ball Of Flame Shoot Fire // Patience

It’s …

Steve Reid died last week.

He was a great drummer – efficient, creative, stylish – who drummed for James Brown, Martha and The Vandellas and Miles Davies. I saw him play when he collaborated with Keiren Hebden (AKA Four Tet) on their series of brilliant experimental albums a few years ago.

The idea watching of one man drumming along to another man fiddling with some knobs and buttons sounds awful, but, against these odds, it was a rare delight.

The music was unconstrained, exciting and half-unplanned, and the purest joy of all was the look of pure …

The thought of the pristine being smudged is always guiltily satisfying.

Scouting For Girls have been at number one in the pop charts, with a typically limp suggestion of a song for two weeks now. This will not stand. What better way to wreak vengeful havoc than hearing their Auntie-Rock desecrated with a really filthy remix?

My nomination for such audio vandalism is Gold Blood, who seem to have the New Band Holy Triumvirate clutched tightly in their clammy hands: substance, momentum and a damn good name.

In songs like Don’t Waste My Time, the legit-retro stainless style of …

This is an interview designed specifically not to eke away at the carefully constructed WALL OF MYSTERY that surrounds the Golau Glau collective.They originally contacted ANBAD with an email consisting of carefully constructed confusion, and we’ve been hooked ever since. Here, they (whoever ‘they’ are) charmingly bat away our quasi-probing questions…

Hi Golau Glau! How are you? Where are you in the world right now? What do you see? And what is good about that place?

We are in GG Towers in the UK, an international HQ for mystique and oompah.

Naturally, we’re all wondering why there’s such secrecy. …

Just how does a band simply vanish?

Death In Vegas: remember them? Four excellent albums, each largely different to the one prior; each accessible, but uncompromising; arty but not awkward; each tapping into the emotional core of the listener, yet capable of soundtracking a party.

It only took one badly-received album for them to disappear. Well, not quite – it was one badly-received album, some tantalisingly promising but aborted recording sessions with Oasis and the onset of Landfill Indie that cast them into the Great Lost Bands Desert.

Try googling them now – they don’t seem up to much, which …

Everyone has a song that, when heard, will whip them up and away to a moment in their past. Mine is the title track of Spiritualized‘s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, and only the opening space-shuttle bleeps are needed for an involuntarily reliving of heady art college days – the tacky plastic smell of cheap acrylic paint, the groping of strange art concepts and stranger art students.

Now Ladies And Gentlemen… has just been re-released, with the obligatory extra discs of new material, in an exciting black variation of the original’s pill-popping packaging. For once, the …

A few years ago, a frankly bizarre incident involving avant-garde noise-troubadours Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a confused petrol station clerk, and a crack FBI team who swooped to arrest them. Why was Oklahoma’s finest called into handcuff-clicking action so swiftly? Because the clerk thought they ‘looked unusual’.

On such small sartorial details the security of the free world pivots. And if GY!BE look like terrorists, then I’m surprised that Wild Palms can pop to the cornershop for milk without being bundled into a sensory deprivation cell.

They don’t look like terrorists, you see, just a bit… unusual. Put it …