So in the end, the inevitable sensation of disappointment prevails – the result of over-hyping a deceptively middle-of-the-road, expensive and charmless event. And that was just Glastonbury.

Ah yes – it’s football again – but this will be the last World Cup related post for a while, I promise. But something occurred to me in between Germany‘s excellent third and brilliant fourth goal. I’d missed a massive opportunity on ANBAD. The World Cup was the perfect excuse to draw tenuous parallels – ANBAD’s favoured type of parallel, natch – between bands and the teams  taking part.

For example: …

As a native English speaker, there’s something hugely satisfying about listening to and reading Scandinavian languages.

Because of the very distant link between our languages, if you squint or strain your ears it almost starts to make sense. It’s like tuning the FM-Radio dial of comprehension down just a few notches – confusing but comforting; a leap into the past, the unknown, another world, or all three simultaneously.

Languages like Swedish can either sound like English spoken by very drunk people or give you the feeling that you’ve just had a bump on the head. Bands like Vampyramiden will make …

As much as I’d like to be able to ignore it, the Brit Awards are an all-invasive part of British life right now, in spite of – or perhaps because of – their overwhelming, bone-china blandness.

The only honest way to react to a celebration of  such mundaneity is to produce yet another facile list, and so here’s the ANBAD Alternative Brit Awards 2010:

1. The Least Comprehensible Appearance Award: The Spice Girls
2. The most affable man who once wrote  songs called Suk My Dik and now makes great mass-market pop albums award: Dizzee Rascal
3. The “I just can’t believe this

…

Two days after In The City has ended, and almost all traces of its existence have dissipated. The buzz has moved elsewhere, and a only few limp posters remain. Shame. The feeling of being in the sticky armpit of the UK’s new music world was nice while it lasted.

So here’s an affectionate* faux-award-ceremony look back at ITC:

The Sudden Flash Of Common Sense award: When an unnamed BBC Radio One DJ left Mark Ronson’s keynote speech after 5 minutes, because he suddenly realised that he hated Mark Ronson ‘with a passion’

When Hair Reigned Supreme: The giant, all …

Anyone who watched man-witch Derren Brown predict the lottery results on TV last week couldn’t have failed to have been massively underwhelmed by his subsequent explanation that it involved “deep maths and patterns within random behaviour.” The real explanation, though, was obvious: Derren Brown sold his soul to the devil and can travel through time.

Still, the more I thought about it, the more I was swayed by his account. I realised that there’s a hint of ‘deep maths and patterns’ within the A New Band A Day archive, in so much that there are a disproportionate number of …

Most of these current posts were written over a month ago, while I was still entrenched, for better or for worse, in city life; the rain, the buzz, the estate agents with £100 haircuts. Right now I’m on a train, zipping through wet green fields towards Manchester, but in real terms, I’m actually somewhere on Mainland Europe, struggling to erect a recalcitrant tent.

This whole exercises has proven the folly of trying to plan too far ahead, or worrying about what might happen. I’d like to think that a scantly-planned low-budget European jaunt will open my eyes and communicate with …

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 …

The second gig I ever went to was to see Manic Street Preachers in 1996. They were just post-Richey, pre-Big Time and were noisier, angrier and more intelligent than anyone I had ever met growing up in Stoke on Trent. I pushed to the very front and spent a happy hour crushed against glum, milk-white girls wearing kohl and leopard print.

The Manics’ primary attraction is their wilful perverseness; actively encouraging people to dislike them, releasing hit-and-miss albums that confuse the unsuspecting. They have veered, in deliberate disorientating fashion, from smooth rock to grating punk to electro-flop and back and …

…

It’s the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin‘s birth. His theory is being debated as furiously now as it has ever been – perhaps even more so. Most people broadly accept evolution as a sound explanation for life’s progress – it’s just that the crazed and dissenting minority are more tooth-rattlingly, mouth-foamingly vocal than ever.

What I enjoy hearing the most is not the mentally disturbed rantings of Creationists, but those who are trying to reconcile their centuries-old religions with a 150-year old scientific theory, a bit like how David Bowie jumped on the Drum ‘n’ Bass bandwagon in the …