I’ve just written a guest article for the BBC about Scandinavian pop music and why those Scandinavians write such darn catchy tunes.

What I discovered was a little stunning (and will be revealed when the article is published – keep ‘em peeled, folks), but it at least partially dispelled any fanciful ideas that our Northern Euro-cousins have a special Pop Hook gene.

But it’s so easy to make these generalisations, isn’t it? You know, like how French-language pop is oh-so suave, jaunty and sophisticated.

Well, here’s Le Couleur to – well, prove exactly that.

OK, L’Amour de Jour…

I’d love to be a polyorchid. Wait – I mean polymath. A polyorchid is a totally different thing entirely, though perhaps both involve having a lot of balls.

Some bands are muso-polymathic, producing all sorts of sounds without, apparently, effort or complication. They zip hither and thither, tweaking this genre and that noise, producing something new, something old, and something in between. Think of these bands as the Anti-Oasis.

Moscow Youth Cult make all sorts of music -  here, a fun-to-the-max throwaway Mario Kart Koopa beach level-esque hula-pop, there a mentalist electro stomper – but inevitably, ANBAD will choose …

Someone told me that Rizzle Kicks are students at the BRIT School of Performing Arts. This strikes me as extremely odd.

The BRIT School is an industry crud-factory that whelps out ‘new talent’, who then get record deals suspiciously quickly, suspiciously win carefully orchestrated ‘Next Big Thing‘ online polls and then suspiciously win BRIT Awards.

This approach  might sell records, but it also means we have to put up with the likes of muddy-voiced warbler Adele, the mind-shreddingly annoying Kate Nash and The Singer From The Kooks Who Thinks He’s Cool.

So what in the blue blazes are …

The combination of getting older and being in possession of a mind that is hard-wired to remember even the most minor musical trivia forever has it’s flaws, I can tell you.

An example of the mysteries of the human mind: when an email about Organ Morgan* popped into my inbox, the band that pinged into my head was 1999 very-minor-sensation M. Organ, who (briefly) wrote Money Mark-esque ditties on his Hammond Organ, and then disappeared without trace.

When you can’t find someone on Google, you know that either a) times are hard for that artist, or b) your …

Here are notes from yesterday’s ‘action’ at the In The City music conference, the UK’s premiere unsigned band shindig:

1. Mark Ronson: silent, bored, ubiquitous skinny trousers ‘n’ scarf combo, giant quiff
2. Steve Lamacq: patient, friendly and his voice is even more delightful in real life
3. Huw Stephens: see Steve Lamacq
4. Assorted PRs, A&R people and managers: busy, busy, busy, and ‘can you print my name more clearly on this AAA Pass please, people won’t be able to see who I am’
   
5. No free bar/buffet: a travesty

I shamefully collared Steve Lamacq and Huw Stephens and stammered incoherently about …

There’s an inherent problem with the Tweecore musical genre, as spearheaded by tinkly Welsh poppers Los Campesinos. It’s that the word ‘Twee’ hasn’t often been used as a positively descriptive word very often.

Twee songs work for a while, and then become so sickly, so wholesome and so…. twee that you start to feel a bit uncomfortable, like when you’ve eaten too much chocolate on Christmas day. There’s not much room for variety when an artist is constrained by such narrow, wide-eyed and sugary parameters.

Today’s New Band, The Candle Thieves, couldn’t really be described as Tweecore, though they are …

I spent a while last weekend watching horses mill around in a field. I like horses – they are less dumb than cows, yet still daft enough to trot over and enthusiastically munch handfuls of grass from me as if it was a rare treat, as opposed to exactly the same stuff they’d been eating straight from the ground all day.

One curious equine trait I noticed is that they will spend hours gnawing on grass that has previously been grazed to near-nothingness, while big, lush clumps of long grass wait, temptingly and un-chewed, just a few metres away. Perhaps, …

A band’s name doesn’t really makes a huge difference to how you perceive them. This isn’t the same as liking a band’s name, which is an arbitrary personal choice – and in the case of heavy metal bands, whether you like the indiscriminate scattering of umlauts or not – but if you think about it, U2 would still be as will-sappingly dreadful even if they were called Bono’s Big-Top Dancing Monkey Troupe.

So: Today’s New Band. Their name is Frantic Clam. Some of you will like the name, some will think it stinks and most will hopefully be too …

At the end of the Pete and the Pirates gig I went to a few weeks ago, I was lingering on the dancefloor, looking for money dropped during the jumping around (old teenage habits die hard). A girl approached me who was either drunk, or high on life. She excitedly thrust a CD into my hand, told me that, “this band are amazing!” and stumbled away.

The band was called Disco Nasties, a name that is satisfying in a Bis kind of way, and they’d supported P&TP that night, though I’d missed them.

Inevitably, I lost the CD …

Last night, I saw Pete And The Pirates* at Moho Live in Manchester. Since I first saw them two years ago, and then again six months ago, they’ve steadily got better – more charming, more interesting, more likely to become the huge success they deserve to be. If their fabulous new songs are anything to go by, their next album will be a corker.

We took a decidedly old-school approach to the gig – blagging our way in for free (“But the band promised we’d be on the guest list”), and smuggling in a hip flask o’ booze for surreptitious …