I’ve been investing great swathes of time listening to the Beastie Boys‘ audio commentaries of the their best albums. They’re a blast, with the three now-veteran (OK, ‘old’) japesters collectively pressing tongues firmly into their cheeks.

Still, these insights are hugely revealing, particularly when it comes to the thorny issue of defining creativity itself. Much time is dedicated to bickering good-naturedly over whether an SP-1200 or Akai MPC-60 was used to sample a novelty cod-funk record, and by their own admission the hectic and brilliant Check Your Head took three years to make: of which two and a half was spent …

Funny how weeks pan out here at ANBAD Towers.

I wasn’t planning on a week of showcasing mainly left-field electronic burbling – astute readers will notice that I don’t plan anything at all – but it has worked out that way. You can tell this at a glance of the ANBAD front page – it’s full of vaguely colourful pictures instead of band images. Electronic artists love to hide behind vaguely colourful images.

It’s often useful not to dwell on the whys, and to simply get stuck into the doing. This, I believe, is the secret behind pretty …

Although I’m now pondering the wisdom of launching a second blog (oh, go on then: it’s www.badcoverversions.com) when I don’t even have enough time to run one, there are also gratifying surprises.

When you’ve listened to Sting violently ruining Jimi Hendrix‘s Little Wing for the tenth time, certain occurrences take place. Naturally, there are feelings of horror, confusion and the instinctive desire to stuff soft objects into the ear canals. But chiefly, it is a genuine appreciation of good music.

Bands like Team Forest thus become more vital than ever. Because now, their metronomic, economic sounds are …

Last Saturday I watched Har Mar Superstar rub Vaseline into his face before having a large quantity of white goo applied to his features. I even took a photo and tweeted it.

Of course, such titillation can only result in disappointment – and in terms of half-hearted sexual connotations, you’d be right – but all these things did indeed take place at the wonderful Unconvention Factory, in Macclesfield.

As with all clever concepts, its brilliance is matched by its simplicity. Take a bundle of new music’s movers, shakers and hangers-on, put them in an old factory and make them talk. …

As usual, the internet is to blame.

Already complicit in the murder – or at least the involuntary manslaughter – of the record shop, the music press and the CD, another important part of rock ‘n’ roll has found itself at peril: the rock legend.

Freeing all that lovely information from its shackles into the public domain has an almot infinite number of positive aspects, but it has also blown a raft of wonderful myths to pieces.

Now we know that of course The Beatles didn’t smoke a joint in  Buckingham Palace, that obviously Keith Richards just made up that …

Remember when Radiohead were just a classic rock band?

No, I’d forgotten too – but there it was, plain as day, when The Bends shuffled onto my iPod (is using one considered retro yet?). The slick, wide, guitar sound is there. A four-square rock structures to all the songs. The lyrics are tangible, comprehensible, forward. It’s classic rock, all right.

The Bends offers no hint of the genre-busting right turn they would take over the course of their next three albums. The Bends‘ big, beautiful rock could just as easily be an album by a band who were about …

That’s a mysterious apostrophe isn’t it? A taunting, curious interruption, that begs half a dozen questions, not the least of which is, ‘Who is Pengilly? And just what is it that belongs to them?’

Hopefully it’s (geddit!?!) presence will irritate the crap out of Lynne Truss, the only woman to ever make an extended book career out of being a grammar pedant. Imagine how much fun she’d be at a dinner party.

Pengilly’s, vicious apostrophe and all, however, would be a delight. Especially if they cooed and fluttered their way through the floaty-light Ivan Splits In Two right …

My flatmate went to see the Arctic Monkeys last week, when they played at the Enormo-dome in Manchester. He walked out of the door at 6pm and returned nine hours later, with a story that defied belief, sanity and most other parameters of human behaviour.

It involved a chance meeting with the band, before proceeding to accompany them tearing things up in a variety of places: backstage (natch), all of the city’s most exclusive bars, a couple of house parties and finally, the pièce de résistance – invading the set of the country’s biggest soap opera, and causing havoc on …

I recently read an article claiming that Paul “L’Oreal Chestnut Brown Tint For Men” McCartney wrote The Long And Winding Road for Tom Jones, who then turned it down. Doubtlessly he was too busy struggling in and out of his tight trousers and brushing his chest hair to contemplate hollering a song written by a mere Beatle.

I find that just too hard to believe. OK, The Long And Winding Road is almost unbearably sentimental to listen to without spontaneously vomiting, but still, why would Tom say no?

Most interesting of all is the fact that Macca wrote …

The laptop has become an instrument in its own right. It’s not enough to have a guitar and the desire to clamber on stage any more – every other band now has a member standing stock still in the shadows at the back, pressing buttons on a laptop, like one half of a Pet Shop Boys tribute act.

This is fine in principle: computerised sounds are more than welcome when a band is enriched in a way unachievable with mere instruments. You’d think that a computer’s endless capacity for minutiae would mean that all bands would now sound massively …