I’m not going to lie. The primary reason I listened to Today’s New Band was because of a lightly-obsessive punctuation fetish. This is a confession of sorts, so here goes: I’m drawn, moth-like, to bands with question marks in their name.

It was once Northern Irish spazz-rockers Therapy?, then marvellous 60′s US fruit-loop garage rockers ? And The Mysterians, and now I’ve tractor-beamed onto today’s super new band, Shark?.

I don’t know why. It’s probably the air of mystery again. What would cause such an exclamation? Is it the last derisive snort of a soon-to-be-devoured, cocky sailor? The unused and …

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Do you wish you’d formed a band? Do you regret that you didn’t? I sometimes wonder, and run through all the excuses – I didn’t know anyone to club together with, I didn’t play the guitar well enough, I was too shy. The truth is more prosaic: the desire just wasn’t there enough.

There’s always been a nagging suspicion that, while being a rock star probably has its perks, an element of boredom might set at some point. You’re midway through a tour, and you’re playing that drab B-side that’s in the set as filler, or because the drummer …

I said that Yesterday’s New Band, Liechtenstein (see below), ‘owes a little to Jesus and Mary Chain‘; this wasn’t a criticism, but I suppose it could be interpreted as such. A large proportion of bands are eager to distance themselves, sonically, from the past, as if this in itself is innovation. It isn’t – and it often results in bands that might well tick the ‘new’ box, but is a million miles from the one marked ‘fun’.

Grabbing a bunch of sounds or attitudes or ideas from the past isn’t to be frowned upon. It makes sense if …

It says much for the depths of resolve in the human psyche that, even when presented with an entirely stressful situation – like, say, moving house – it’s approached with delightfully optimistic naivety. “Surely this time, it’ll all be one, smooth, graceful procedure,” you muse, gingerly lifting the first of many boxes.

So, by the end of the process, how did I end up exhausted, aching, soaked through with rain, and sitting in a strange pub with a shellshocked look on my face? Having blanked out the preceding 48 traumatic hours, even I can’t answer that question. Sat in …

Some bands, as we know, make records that are documentation of their live shows, and others perform live shows that are attempts at recreating their records. Neither is inferior – just an indicator of the band’s core ethos. So are Today’s New Band better live or on record?

That might depend on your idea of ‘better’, of course. Male Bonding make records that are a delicate balance between generic thrash (headbanging live gigs) and obtuse guitar weirdness (chin-stroking live gigs), and in doing so, create music that lives in its own space that is better than both.

Pumpkin shoots a …

I’ve battled with my brain’s inability to mull over a good song before. It’s testimony to a bad song‘s raison d’etre that the exact thing that you hate about it – the dreadful catchy melody – is the one thing that the song-processing bit of your mind latches onto, limpet-like.

Events in the petty soap-opera battle between my subconscious and musically bewildered conscious self have taken an interesting turn – yesterday I had a mixture – a mash-up, if you will – of two songs playing on my internal jukebox. And not any old mash-up, either.

This …

So there’s this guy who drinks in my local pub. He’s in his 40s, and is always dressed in expensive, new, young-ish clothes. He looks like someone - a retired rock star maybe, but not the lead singer or guitarist. I don’t know, someone, like, say, Andy Rourke, from The Smiths.

You can probably now see where this is going, but I couldn’t, and eyeballed him over my pint for a good six months before the cogs in my head finally clicked into place and the little voice piped up, “Look, idiot, it’s Andy Rourke from The Smiths, …

After musing on Monday about the difficulties of finding band members with a similar musical outlook, here’s an example of a band who, I think, fell happily together in a flash. They’re Pop Fosters, they’re Today’s New Band, and their initial conversation went something like this:

Sara Pop Fosters: “Want to form a band in which thrashing sounds from the drums and guitar form the limits of our complications?”

Richie Pop Fosters: “Well… I can play the guitar REALLY LOUD and can YELP with the best of them…”

Sara Pop Fosters: “Let’s ROCK, sunshine”

And lo, the …

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