Wednesday. It's the day after In the City. If there's one thing that's usually certain about Manchester the day after In The City it's that gigs are generally under-attended: reserves of cash and energy are running low, and even those who still have some of both left (yesterday was day-job payday for me, and I've spent most of today in bed) are generally feeling a little musically jaded. I have to admit that had I not bought a ticket I might not have gone out myself - but then I knew I'd feel like this, which is precisely why I did so. As I brandish the piece of cardboard at Ciaran on the door he looks at me like I've grown an extra head -  Ruby Lounge is effectively MM's "home venue" these days; and they always let us in if we're reviewing. I'm not, though, as I tell him "I'm having a night off." Which basically means I can wander in at the end of the support band's set and not feel bad about missing them (the Ruby Lounge crew have been working as hard as we have, and with only two bands on the bill I guess they decided to get it all done relatively early) and just enjoy the band I've come to see without making notes...

At the end of 2007 I asked nine friends whose music taste I respect to recommend me one album of the year I might have missed; the tenth item on my catch-up list being The Twilight Sad's "Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters" largely because a regular contributor to both I Like Trains' and The Longcut's forums banged on about them so much there had to be something there. And there was - everything from that title (I was a midwinter child myself and interestingly so were a disproportionate number of my favourite musicians/songwriters) to the stirring darkness that permeated its tracks. There seemed to be a lot of death and other fucked-up shit going on in there, inasmuch as I could actually understand James Graham's heavily-accented vocals. It's defbinitely one of my favourite albums of the decade, but it was more of a slow-burner than an instant love, so after less than five listens I'm not sure exactly yet how the recently released follow-up "Forget The Night Ahead" compares, but it's good - very good, and in a year where most of the best music has been electronic-based, it stands head and shoulders above most other "indie" released in 2009.

Tonight's set is a well-chosen balance between the two. James Graham is on stunning form; shaven-headed now his intensity is almost frightening. Sometimes he crouches at floor level, eyes closed tightly, rocking on his heels, or he stands side-on, microphone held high so he's effectively projecting at it. Sometimes he effectively does it a capella, his voice as powerful as it is chilling. The passion in the man is just incredible.The band, too, sound incredible tonight. Ruby Lounge does have a particularly good sound system and everything is perfect, from the claustrophobic clatter of drums to driving bass and atmospheric guitars. And I think yeah, there's your Interpols and your Editors and the monochrome photocopy brigade, but if you're looking for a true heir to the likes of the Chameleons and golden-age Bunnymen et al, then this band is a serious contender. There's no encore after the hour's set, but you get the feeling this is largely because James has given everything. I'm quite pleased at the relatively early finish (home for 11) but equally glad I bought that ticket.

Thursday I swap to my other work head; after a day pounding the streets of Leeds flyering and postering for the Air Cav / Daniel Land gig there next week it's time to load up the car for Air Cav who are supporting Alaska In Winter at the deeply strange Nexus Art Cafe - a place in which I'd never set foot prior to Sunday's In The City gig. It's only slightly less weird tonight; the large crucifix stage adornment has thankfully gone, but the equally large teddy-bear's still there.

The incredibly talented Charlie Barnes is first on - as he will be at our Leeds gig next week - and the promoter admits the last-minute booking (replacing a band who have gone off to university and "sort-of" split up; naming no names largely as I can't remember who they were, but seriously, whoever you are, why did you take the booking in the first place?) is a result of my raving about the lad. No pressure, then. He doesn't let me down. Tonight's set seems more vocal-and-piano-based and less post-rock than my previous experience of him - this, though, is equally remarkable as everything is multitracked live and utterly spellbinding.

As with Sunday's ITC performance Air Cav start with their newest, as yet untitled, track and continue with the blissful hazy jangle of "Keychain" - and as with pretty much every support gig they've played they make an instant and positive impression on the headliner's crowd... and then a bass string snaps. Yep, you read that right. How often do you see a bass string snap? Mark looks as surprised as I am, and I've been to a good 15 years' more gigs than he has. Unfortunately it's one of his most-used ones (the jokes that most basses and bassists only have four to start with are obvious, if unhelpful) and it has to happen on a night where there's not another band with a bassist on the bill... he has little choice but to soldier on without it. He, the rest of the band, and I, of course, hear everything that's not right as a result. However, the audience hear a brilliant set and a few say, either to me or within earshot, that they'll come and see them again. Job done.

I'd been quite looking forward to seeing Alaska In Winter (whom I've been confusing all week with Winter North Atlantic, to the point where I've had to check pretty much every time I've done any promotion for it - amusingly, I discover there is also a band called Winter Un Alaska whose webpage starts with the words "Winter in Alaska was a band before Alaska in Winter was a band" - technically fairly indisputible given that Brendan Bethancourt AKA A.I.W. is a bloke, not a band) and seeing how he recreates his lush multi-leveled orchestral electronica live, but sadly we've got to get the gear back to the rooms. Seems I didn't really miss much. Reports from those who stayed say he basically did live vocals over a completely prerecorded set of music and projections: I'm probably more accustomed to live electronics than most of the Mushaboom crowd and quite aware that some of it will always be ready-prepared, but when you watch (say) Maps or Fuck Buttons or Ulrich Schnauss or whoever you can see that things are being played live. I don't know if he caught any of Charlie Barnes' set earlier but it gives me great pleasure to say that the internationally acclaimed and Pitchfork-loved signed recording artist could learn a lot from the kid from Huddersfield.

Friday it's the first date proper of the Maps tour and it couldn't really be much closer to home for me - we're off to The Warehouse Project. For the uninitiated (or non-local) this is a temporary multi-room club which aims to recreate the atmosphere of old-school warehouse raves in suitably urban-cool locations around Manchester. Its first incarnation in 2006 was in the then-recently closed Boddingtons brewery site at Strangeways, which I believe is now a car park. In 2007 it was in an actual warehouse, specifically the Princess Street one which had previously housed Factory Records' dying days and then the Paradise Factory club. This year it's stuck with 2008's tried-and-tested location; the vast arches under Piccadilly Station on Store Street: once a wartime air-raid shelter, occasonal home to somewhat less legal rave activities in the 80s, and now - a car park. The arrows on the floor do become quite useful later on when the smoke machine's been going for a while and you need to fnd the toilets.

I'd really wanted to go and see worriedaboutsatan at the King's Arms, but annoyingly the promoters have decided to stick Maps on about second. God only knows why.
 
Higher up the bill are the likes of Jon Hopkins and Jack Penate (Jack fucking Penate?!) and as if that's not bad enough someone's made the immensely stupid decision to stick Gold Panda (who's supported Maps before and is likely to appeal to the same sort of people) on at the same time in the other room. Thank goodness at least that they've given Maps more guest list than they could possibly need so me and four mates are saved the £20 entrance fee. I think this is why I don't usually go to the Warehouse Project actually - £20 seems a lot even if you do usually get a pretty big list of names (live dance music in all its forms, and DJs) and most nights sell out, so you have to plan ahead somewhat. Once inside we're pleasantly surprised that the drinks prices aren't as colossal as they could probably have got away with, and the unadorned arches do give the place a very Hacienda-like feel. Django Django are on the main stage in the largest arch when we get there; earlier in the pub someone told us one of them was the brother of one of The Beta Band and there are actually musical similarities there too, along with the traditional Scottish art-school Devo-revivalist indie-funk. We rather like them. Even if they are wearing safari suits.

By the time we've had chance to check out the other rooms - and the festival-like Portaloo compound (in which much later on I will open the door of an unlocked cubicle and interrupt two rather pilled-up looking girls mid sexual act; my male companions are all keen to know exactly which cubicle, for some reason...) - it's time for Maps.

This is how Maps should be seen and heard. Not in the indie clubs and pub upstairs rooms that comprise most of the rest of the tour, not in the overly well-lit Deaf Institute, but in a proper rave atmosphere where people are actually dancing and strobes are bouncing off brick walls. Smoke billowing behind them, I swear "It Will Find You" has never sounded so perfect - and the thing about this crowd, too, is unlike the regular "indie" gig crowds we've seen elsewhere and doubtless will again as the week goes on, they don't give a shit that there are no guitars or bass or drums; they don't care that there's not a lot off the first album here; because a fair few of them probably have no idea who they're watching or less still care. They just know a fucking great thundering electro tune when they hear one, and when the end bit of "Papercuts" breaks into something Balearic there's a sea of hands in the air.
 

More people pile in (the place is open til 5 but last entry's half eleven so a lot are coming in to beat the post-pub scramble) and feels like a full-on party now with James and August gleefully at the helm. August says something incomprehensible. "Um, he's Danish" explains James. I get the feeling this might become a tour in-joke. By the time they finish on a truly brickwork-trembling version of "Love Will Come" they basically own the place. Yeah, they should have been on later, shoul have had a longer set, but this was a half hour of euphoria of the very highest order. This band should be out there on the LCD / Soulwax circuit. This band was made to play in railway arches and warehouses and air raid shelters. This is one of the many reasons why I love them.

We can't really be bothered watching any more bands after that. The chill-out room's pleasant, even if it does smell very strongly of cooking rice. There's the aforementioned lavatorial incident. By half one I've run out of fags, can't face another drink, and am aware I have a very long train journey ahead tomorrow. On which, incidentally, I've written the entire blog up to this point.
 

Saturday. OK, look, I do love Maps and I do love awaydaying but there was no way I was going to go all the way to Southampton. That would be silly. As such, a couple of weeks ago I checked TheTrainline in order that the extravagant prices charged by rail companies these days would be the final nail in that idea. (Un)fortunately, the cheapest available ticket was 15 quid and I'd bought it before the common sense bit of my brain had chance to intervene...
 

Southampton is weird. I'm not sure I ever found the city centre. None of the roads on my Multimap print appear to exist in reality, Gadgetphone's SatNav has gone mental and refuses to believe I am not at Bristol Parkway railway station (the last place, I guess, I used it) and the locals polite but astonishingly useless at giving directions around their own city. I give up and get a taxi, and having located the venue settle in a nearby gay bar, on the grounds that it's the only pub in the close vicinity of Joiners that doesn't look like a stabbing waiting to happen.

First support Last Action Hero is quite definitely a punch in the face waiting to happen. It's not just that his blend of emo and electro, with agonisingly loud grating vocals and fairly bogstandard beats, is quite horrible - although it is. Now you know I don't, on principle, usually do out-and-out slatings of up-and-coming / support acts - but I'm going to make an exception here: half way through his set a charity collector wanders in, and the nasty little twat has a go at her, instructing the crowd not to give her any money as she's "probably a fake". I find myself hoping one of his close family succumbs to whatever it was she was collecting for. He also tells his mates, effectively, not to bother with the headliner or main support and to go to some bar with him instead. That said, good riddance.

Tour support is billed as It Hugs Back, a band I remember seeing once supporting Holy Fuck, and described them as "a bit shoegazey, a bit American college lo-fi, possibly in possession of some Jesus And Mary Chain records" - tonight it's a solo set from singer Matthew, just him and an acoustic guitar, and what with his hazy tunes and slacker hair I'm reminded a lot of Evan Dando. A pretty odd choice to support an electronic band but pleasantly enjoyable nonetheless. Seems he's doing the whole tour, anyway. The name It Hugs Back still really gives me the creeps, though.
 

It may not be a strobe-addled rave in an undergound car park but it's kind of space-age in a different way: by the time Maps walk onstage there is so much dry-ice billowing round the room all we see is two silhouettes working their banks of machines, in whatever lurid shade the spotlights decide. It slowly disperses to reveal our deliriously happy looking protagonists, still buzzing (and in one case possibly still actually up) from last night.

This is the full-length set and it flows beautifully, travelling through space towards the euphoric climax and once again the slight worries of the summer, that audiences might not connect with the guitar-free format, are roundly dispelled. The inclusion of "You Don't Know Her Name" is a good idea - probably the closest thing to a hit from the first album's haul of great singles - but what strikes me is the fact that this beautiful sun-blazed song, my official Festival Anthem Of The Summer 2007 which I don't think I went a day without listening to from about May to September that year, is actually one of the lesser moments here. By the end people are dancing again and Southampton on a Saturday night doesn't seem too bad a place to be.

A couple of days later I'll visit a friend in Nottingham who used to live in Southampton a few years back. She confirms that I was correct in identifying at least one of the nearby pubs as scary. Working in the betting shop over the road, sometimes went in the pub after befriending some of the locals, including one nice polite chap... whom she eventually discovered had served 20 years for killing someone with a machete. Turns out he wasn't the only one, either; many of the regulars owed their very presence there to the Good Friday Agreement...

Sunday - is it? Yep. I know this by the fact that train services are even more rubbish than usual. I leave Southampton just before 8am, and  - despite the sort of tight connection that involves a sprint the entire length of St Pancras Station (and there's a hell of a lot of St Pancras Station) arrive in Nottingham at two in the bloody afternoon. That's OK though, the first band I want to see's not on til quarter past three...

Another all-dayer. Not content with hosting Dot To Dot in May, October sees Nottingham's sort of edgier all-day venue-hop, the Hockley Hustle. Hockley being the road most of the venues are on. Not Hockley Road or anything, just Hockley. The bargain-tastic £10 ticket (£7.50 if you bought it far enough ahead) allows access to 20 different venues, where the discerning music fan could experience such delights as Spam Chop, Pee Wee's Funk Salad, You're Smiling Now But We'll All Turn Into Demons, Ocean Bottom Nightmare, the Yeah I'll Play It Later DJs and - our favourite - Arse Full Of Chips. The variety of genres on offer is far greater than these all-dayers usually afford: indie, drum'n'bass, dubstep, samba, hip-hop, rock/metal and whatever the hell Arse Full Of Chips do (we guess at grotty pub punk) and you have to hand it to them for co-ordinating such a mammoth task - but I had quite enough venue-hopping during In The City. At the top end of Hockley, DrownedInSound have colonised a nice pub called Bunker's Hill, the sort of place that offers a 15p discount on its real ales to CAMRA members, and stuffed it full of shoegaze and space-rock of various sub-genres.
 

I have some preconception as to what 93 Million Miles From The Sun will sound like, as they come recommended by the most fundamentalist shoegazer I know. And sure enough, they are so old-school fuzzpop (as in variable stations along the MBV/JAMC axis) they have a stand-up drummer and cover The Telescopes' Perfect Needle. Along with several of their own songs that sound rather a lot like it... we're also amused by the fact that they're, well, not exactly 20 any more. Might even have been there first time round. This doesn't matter. The drummer appears to be completely bonkers, too, exclaiming mid-set for no apparent reason "Anyone for ice-creams!?" We never quite work this out. A week later in Stoke, a member of Lovelust who have played with them before tells us he's prone to that sort of thing. Um, OK...

After catching them a few times around the start-up circuit (Live At Leeds all-dayers and Dry Bar's Thursday sessions) I haven't seen I Concur for a couple of years. I always said they were the offspring of The Chameleons and I Like Trains - in a good way - and certainly these days it's the former that's risen to the top. The textures and crescendos are still very much intact in the guitar work but the rhythm section seems to have hardened up, the vocals intensified. Stirring stuff indeed.

Daniel Land And The Modern Painters go on ten minutes early, in order to squeeze a 40 minunte set out of the regulation half hour slot afforded each band except the headliners - they've had no soundcheck whatsoever, they just walk onstage and they're straight into the zone. Sometimes when you watch a band you can pick out which guitarist's doing what - lead here and rhythm there - but here the three guitars are more like the conduits by which all the sound-waves in the universe are channelled into something coherent and beautiful. One criticism sometimes levelled at (for want of a better word) "shoegaze" (and sometimes rightly so) is that it can all end up being a little amorphous, directionless even, and it's the salvo of tricks up their sleeves with which Daniel Land And The Modern Painters avoid falling into this trap that makes them special. The deep sonic whirlpool just before the vocals kick in towards the end of "Within The Boundaries" which echoes (unwittingly, as none of the band had actually heard it) a similar moment in I Like Trains' "Terra Nova" with the same pine-tingling effect. The amazing coda to "Off Your Face Again" which sounds like Ride jamming with the Stone Roses rhythm section, drummer Jason Magee taking the whole thing up a level: shoegaze you could actually dance to?! And then there's that ear-splitting ending, a sort of kaleidoscopic multi-hued cousin to My Bloody Valentine's "holocaust" of pure white noise.
 

At which point we retire to a nearby pizza restaurant to refuel and make sure our ears are still working...

Back in time for Worriedaboutsatan. With the clocks having gone back last night, even their relatively early slot sees darkness outside - and inside, too, as the rather sweetly unassuming looking pair are lit by just their regular backdrop of Géla Babluani's "13 Tzameti" plus a single swinging bare lightbulb which seems oddly fitting. Now I always knew they were good, but sometimes they are so much more and tonight seems like one of those nights. You think Fuck Buttons' introsuction of techno to their post-prog recipes was a good idea? These guys did it first. Only they threw in a third dimension, too; the creepy, Burial-esque dark end of dubstep. During their continuous piece guitars are bowed and fed through boxes until they don't sound like guitars any more, waves of synth rise and fall, and a thousand little clicks and pops fill the spaces.
 

They finish, and at first there's silence. Then applause. "More!" shouts someone. They've had their 30 minutes, but it's not like they've a drumkit to strip before the next band... the shouts are growing now. This may be their first ever encore. It's a piece of deep fluid techno, like Ulrich Schnauss in dancefloor mode. It's brilliant.

There isn't much time to retune our heads to guitar mode after that, but it helps that the next band have some rather big tunes to their name: they are The Domino State and they exist somewhere around the blurred line between post-punk overcoat pop and shoegaze, like the Bunnymen gone Ride. You know that massive coda on "The Cutter"? They have one song that just basically does that for the whole song. The Chameleons and Psychedelic Furs also loom large in their shadowy but uplifting sound.
 

A heavy schedule of support slots, culminating in those high-profile Bunnymen warm-ups earlier this month, have left Exit Calm the undisputed kings of the half hour slot. There is, quite simply, not another band on this earth who can put so much into thirty minutes, make you feel like they've done an hour and still leave you wanting more. But then how many still-unsigned bands have a travelling army of fans, some of whom make my gig count (this is the 18th time I've seen them) seem utterly pathetic, and some of whom fly from overseas just to watch them? They're just... intoxicating. You can feel like you're tripping watching them even if you're stone cold sober. I know, it's happened to me, it can make the drive home afterwards interesting. This is the standard four-epic 30-minuter, and from Rob Marshall's first sheets of interweaving guitar in "You've Got It All Wrong" to Nicky Smith's cheeky appropriation of a few lines from the Mondays' "Wrote For Luck" in the closing stages of "Hearts And Minds" you're just literally drowned in sound. The leading light of said music website is in fact standing next to me throughout this, and he very much is, too. Oh yeah, one more thing. You will see a load of Verve comparisons when this band finally get their debut album out early in 2010. I know I'm guilty of making them myself in the past - and at the start, that was kind of where Exit Calm were coming from. They have long since transgressed that. I saw Verve right in my face in tiny venues back when they were just Verve and a bloody good band; I saw The Verve at one of their last gigs at the end of 2007; they were never this fearsomely powerful.

They are not, as I have said many times, an easy one to follow. Tonight this unfortunate task befalls The Boxer Rebellion. A band whom, despite wide admiration for them amongst a great number of my friends and a resulting effort on my part, I've just never been able to get into. There's nothing wrong with them. All the ingredients are there: rolling bass, guitar delay, impassioned vocals, stage presence, darkness and light - but they have neither Exit Calm's nuclear power, The Domino State's way with a tune nor The Twilight Sad's hairs-on-back-of-neck factor. Sure, they get some way to all three, but other times they're only one step up from Editors, and I need at least two before I'm interested. I know it goes against popular wisdom and I appreciate they're loved and respected - and their rise from the ashes, re-signed after being dropped and sticking out their next album themselves - is still a victory for the grass roots that anyone who cares about music should celebrate - they just don't do much for me.

Not that we're complaining. It's been a quite astonishing day of music with all profits going to Oxfam. Daniel and co head back to Manchester, but I won't be home for a few days yet. I am officially on holiday...

So, Monday afternoon and I'm back in London. Maps are playing at Cargo and I'm quite worried it's going to be a bit quiet: I'm told The Longcut played a brilliant gig there last Monday but the crowd wasn't massive. People don't like going out on Mondays. The worry flips to the complete opposite mid aftermoon when a message from Maps HQ says it's sold out - bugger, one of my mates hasn't got a ticket. Turns out to be neither - my mate grabs one of the last few tickets and they play to a full venue. Result. The bloke from It Hugs Back is opening here; sadly his rather quiet sort of JAMC-gone-acoustic tunes seem to bypass most of the early arrivals. We're stood about three metres back from the stage and he's barely audible even here; further back the bar chatter is probably winning.
 

Main support tonight is Banjo Or Freakout, whom me and my mate definitely remember being two people when we (separately) saw them before: just the one of them tonight, though, although he does seem to be playing rather a lot of instruments at once. Sometime the following evening another mate will comment to me, after watching Fuck Buttons, that he can't get used to just seeing two blokes and a pile of electronics onstage "instead of a band", whereas this week I seem to be seeing quite a few one-man versions. All of whom I can't help comparing to Charlie Barnes in much the way all the two-man versions are measured against Maps and/or Worriedaboutsatan. Banjo Or Freakout is good, a kind of edgy post-rock variant on the theme. Unfortunately I am distracted from his set by the sudden and unexpected death of the Gadgetphone.

Oh god, what am I going to do now?

Gadgetphone has been my loyal and trusted companion for two years. Much of what you have read here over the past two years started life on its little screen, either as keywords or full reviews. Even during this year's In The City with laptop in tow, you can't exactly get a laptop out and start hammering at it when a band's onstage can you? Moreover I am a long way from home, halfway through a major away-trip and I now have no clock, no way of checking addresses or emails without getting out a fucking computer (which I'm now very happy I have, but still), and nobody's phone number. SHIT. My good friend and BSP regular legend Boom responds to this by buying me lots of vodka. It doesn't mend my phone, but it does help me postpone the welling panic and enjoy the gig. Thank you Boom.

Maps have played a gig in Birmingham since I last saw them and the pair of them still appear to be on a rolling buzz. It's not the best gig of the tour, sure, there are a few technical hitches too many, but the vast majority of the crowd don't notice this. There's a slightly disturbing interlude where James starts apologising for being rubbish - we all know he is anything but. The general atmosphere in the crowd is great though - not quite the Warehouse Project but that was Manchester on a Friday night, this is London on a Monday. There are more people actually dancing than I think I have ever seen at a London gig of any description before.

The last thing I remember is Boom heading off in a minicab with Maps producer and Death In Vegas man Tim Holmes, having deposited me back where I as staying, thanking my lucky stars I decided to get a laptop. Most of Tuesday is therefore spent not doing the vast number of really important things I had to, but desperately trying to get a new phone. Somehow I end up with a Blackberry. At the time of writing I'm not sure if I like it or hate it. I do manage to find a little oasis of calm in all the chaos, though: the little sanctuary that is PureGroove Records opposite Smithfield Market.

Last time I was in there, maybe a year or so ago, it still looked mostly like a record shop. These days it certainly has elements of the record shop about it - records displayed on the wall which you can buy and a pile of magazines in the corner - but it seemsw to have more elements of a cafe-bar. Like comfy armchairs, tables and, well, a bar. It's an interesting survival strategy in an era where indie shops are up against the internet - and I am guilty, I'm afraid, stocking up my Amazon basket throughout the month to hit the checkout button on payday. Sorry. The bar is an extension of the shop's frequent and popular instores, which happen a few days a week both at lunchtime and in the early evening. And today's guests are the newest discoveries of Sonic Cathedral, Yeti Lane.
 

Yeti Lane are French and very indie-pop; their single "Lonesome George" is a reference to a particular Galapagos tortoise believed to be the last of his kind (yet again, music sends me off on an interesting learning experience ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geochelone_nigra_abingdoni ) - some vaguely Krauty synth work and Byrdsian Americana guitar however holds their sunshiney pop the right side of the twee line.
 

Later I meet up with a few of my London mates - we're going to Heaven. No, really. As Belinda Carlisle once helpfully informed us, Heaven is place on earth - it is, too. Specifically a gay club near Charing Cross whose foyer posters tell us is rather more used to hosting Gay Porn Idol than electronic duos. I dunno, you wait all your life for a pair of blokes with a load of cables and then three come along at once - tonight's is Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power, collectively Fuck Buttons, and from the volume of the Andy Weatherall DJ set I can heard from said foyer while the staff faff about being really not very good at finding anyone's name on the door pick-up tickets list, they are going to be seriously bloody loud. Inside we're impressed with the quality of the sound system; loud it may be but clean as anything. The venue itself is beautiful, too.
 

When they eventually start (we're thinking they're actually getting too big now to be doing all their own cable-plugging-in in full view of the audience: if you can't trust roadies to do it maybe get a curtain?) the sound is spot on, "Surf Solar" alone feels like a joyride in a spaceship, and for the second time in two nights I witness people at a gig in London dancing! Lasers fire, strobes flicker and the duo do their trademark bouncing their heads up and down while facing each other across their control panel thing. Obly occasionally do I have to do a double-take and wonder how the hell this peculiar band, two geeky looking boys seemingly weaned on the less melodic end of Krautrock, have got to be this successful? That they have can only be a good thing. And yet... and yet... don't get me wrong, I did a lot of my growing up in techno clubs and indeed to Andy Weatherall's beats; I think Fuck Buttons have made a great success of blending these sounds into their existing musical vocabulary and "Tarot Sport" is a great album (probably top five, even in this quite astonishing year for albums). But when they come back for an encore and that eerie bleakly repetitive drone cuts across the brickwork arch, accompanied at first by just a single green laser beam, this is when they are truly sublime. It is, of course, "Sweet Love For Planet Earth", one of the greatest tracks released this decade, and it still sounds like little else before or since. I shouldn't hold it against them that they've not quite equalled it yet.

If it's Wednesday, it must be... Bristol. The original plan was to try and catch Puressence first at the O2 Academy and then go see Maps at the astonishingly-named Start The Bus, but this appears to be the one night of Puressence's tour where they're on at a normal time as opposed to tea-time. Ah well. An old mate I've not seen for ages is out so we're at the venue pretty early and - yes - look, it's another two-blokes-and-some-stuff band!
 

This is Cajita (presumably pronounced to rhyme with "fajita", so rapidly nicknamed "Car Heater" by us) and their USP is that the Stuff includes a trumpet. This is not only less frightening than you're probably thinking, it's actually really good - danceable, a bit post-rock, lots of interesting looped sounds. "There is a story to how I got the name "cajita"", the Myspace page tells us, "but it's not as interesting as you might hope". Fair enough then, won't ask. The lad from It Hugs Back's set almost entirely passes us by, again. Oops.

It's a very weird venue. As in it's basically the back third or so of a food-drink-chrome type bar (local mate explains it used to be an Edwards, as in hideous Yates's-like chain) separated from the rest of it by a thick black curtain. At the far end, there's a step down to a little square of dancefloor with a tiny stage that would make for an interestingly imtimate experience for any band of four or more people. And the dressing room is upstairs at the far end of the public bit of the bar, so the band has to walk through the entire clientele to get to the stage, including those who have chosen to drink in the bar but not pay to get in the gig, which must be a bit odd.
 

This is possibly Maps' best performance of the tour to date. Despite the fact that someone has stolen James's tambourine. He asks if anyone's got a spare. It would be the funniest thing ever if someone did, but yeah, somewhat unlikely. This kind of sets the scene for a set peppered with increasingly incomprehensible banter, a real party spirit and demands for an encore. "We can do an encore, but it'll be shit" grins James (who incidentally is wearing about the fourth different extremely cool vintage Adidas jacket of the tour so far). It's "Valium In the Sunshine" and it's very much not shit.
 

Back at the Travelodge, I shudder at the sight of some dark-clothed men hanging around the open doors of a Transit van with guitars, but thankfully it isn't Puressence so I (a) don't get guilt-tripped for missing their gig and (b) do actually get some sleep...

I'm going to kind of wrap things up now, aside from a few pictures, as basically the rest of the week is spent watching the same bands.
 

Thursday sees the start of Daniel Land And The Modern Painters' tour proper, at Leeds Cardigan Arms with Air Cav and Charlie Barnes supporting. Sounds like a great line-up? I thought so. Which is why I hired a venue to put it on. Unfortunately despite a massive promotional drive it's pretty under-attended: people of Leeds, you will regret not being there one day, and the handful who were will remind you of this at every opportunity. I hope. All three play absolutely amazing sets, too. Oh well.

Friday Maps are at Digital in Brighton and I can't resist any excuse to visit my beloved Second City: again, it's not quite the turn-out I'd have expected (maybe the lowest of the tour so far, but the "indie" wing of the fanbase is very much split with The Twilight sad across town) but another spot-on set.
 

And Saturday, it's off to the utterly terrifying Stoke-on-Trent with Daniel Land And The Modern Painters.
 

Must give a mention here to local support Lovelust, who play an astonishingly good set despite two of their number having been already turfed out for doing something naughty and chemical in the bogs. They're allowed back in to play, and they've come on immensely since last time I saw them: deep fluid Wooden Shjips type drone psychedelia is the order of the day. Highly recommended.

Daniel Land And The Modern Painters play their best gig in ages, too. the tour continues for a few days yet - catch them before they go supernova.

It is also one of the weirdest nights out ever: a young man identified by Daniel as a recent Big Brother contestant is walking around with a video camera filming the band, crowd and indeed floor, another over-enthusiastic lad corners the band afterwards to tell them they remind him of Fleetwood Mac (eh?) and our regular companion Alex and the remaining members of Lovelust have a sort of unofficial competition to see who can steal the most of the venue's Halloween decorations. A mention must be made, too, of the outstandingly misspelt poster...

It is also my 20th consecutive night out watching live music, which I suspect is something of a personal record. I'm still half considering trying to make it to Norwich for Maps on Sunday, but by the morning I'm struggling to make it to the kitchen, and spend the next two days in bed with a really bad cold. I probably deserved it. October is amazing, but I'm kind of glad it only happens once a year.

http://www.myspace.com/thetwilightsad
http://www.myspace.com/charliebarnes
http://www.myspace.com/aircavmusic
http://www.myspace.com/alaskainwinter
http://www.myspace.com/djangotime
http://www.myspace.com/mapsmusic
http://www.myspace.com/ithugsback
http://www.myspace.com/93millionmilesfromthesun
http://www.myspace.com/iconcurband
http://www.myspace.com/danielland
http://www.myspace.com/worriedaboutsatan
http://www.myspace.com/thedominostate
http://www.myspace.com/exitcalm
http://www.myspace.com/theboxerrebellion
http://www.myspace.com/banjoorfreakout
http://www.myspace.com/yetilane
http://www.myspace.com/fuckbuttons
http://www.myspace.com/cajita
http://www.myspace.com/lovelust08

Monday evening starts in TV21 where I am one of precisely four punters in the basement at 6.14pm, one minute before the first band are due on. Luckily by 6.15 there's another 30. Phew, was worried for a second there. The Law are from Dundee and spent the summer ripping up T In The Park before being crowned XFM Scotland's Breathrough Act 2009, and their set starts with a warning siren, which is always good.

What follows is completely unreconstructed four-chord meat'n'potatoes indie punk rock'n'roll which could have existed at any point in time since Dr. Feelgood first dragged their Transit to the pubs of London. And yeah, it's not a million miles from their good mates The View, and was recently panned in the NME for being unimaginative. Well, yeah, OK, can't say I'd go out and buy one of their records, but that's not the point - this isn't music to sit and listen to in your bedroom or to contemplate the inner depths - it's music to watch live in a sweaty basement. They say unimaginative, I say timeless. Chunky riffs, loads of woah-ohs and Oasis-when-they-were good choruses, I came here expecting to hate them and left thinking about the large gulf between the fickle music press (two years ago NME would have loved them) and what a lot of people actually enjoy. By three songs in there's a sizeable crowd and a few of them are singing along. And yes, if I'm being honest, they're shit - shit but fun.

There's more noisy punk rock'n'roll going on in the Roadhouse - only with more emphasis on the punk, here. Brighton's Telegraphs are reminiscent of early Idlewild - great thrusting choruses and angry riffs - and guitarist Aung Yay clearly isn't wearing that Black Flag T-shirt as a fashion item. They actually seem to get more abrasive as they go on, almost as if they decided not to scare people too early on - it is barely seven o'clock after all. Thing is even at their most aggressive they've still got massive tunes, and the macho edge is tempered slightly by the fact that energetic, monitor-mounting frontman Darcy Harrison shares vocals with bassist Hattie Williams. That said, she plays like Lemmy's secret daughter and looks like she could easily have any of her male bandmates in a fight.

OK, I admit even I can't get from The Roadhouse to Bar38 in ten minutes so I miss the start of the very hotly tipped Copy Haho, but I believe Tristan saw them yesterday so we might have a report somewhere. Blending a bit of grungey alt-rock with air-punching indie anthemics they land in a similar territory to Nine Black Alps. With the side-order of Pavement that's clearly one of this year's must-haves now the indie godfathers have reformed. 2010 is the new 1992, apparently.

It's all been a bit, well, guitar-ish today, hasn't it? Thank heavens then for Unicorn Kid and a much-needed electronic fix. I'm watching him with a fellow Hacienda-generation survivor and we can't believe this 17-year-old kid is channelling the spirit of our own teenage years via the slightly more up-to-date technology of a laptop and some rewired games machines. One track does sound rather like "Hardcore Uproar" for fuck's sake, only faster, and the lad wasn't even born when that came out. It's not just beats, though, there are fantastically loopy mathematical melodies that echo the electropop of even earlier generations like OMD on speed or a raved-up Jean-Michel Jarre. Oh, and he's wearing an animal-head hat. Ace.

"Are these Scousers?" asks my mate. We get the book out - nope, Young Rival are... Canadian. Canadian Scousers? We've gone over the road to Studio and the band onstage is Young Rival. They sound like a garage-punk Beatles. Like The Beatles probably sounded back in Hamburg when they were whizzed up to the eyeballs playing through dirty distorting PA's, only Young Rival's distortion's meant to be there. By the end of the set it's full-on garagey rock'n'roll blues and they do it really well, tight as anything, sweat soaking through the guitarist's moptop fringe. We're still amused by the idea of Canadian Scousers, though.

Hook And The Twin are a bit of a mind-melting experience. They consist of one bloke who records all sorts of demented things (himself singing or occasionally wailing; heavily distorted guitar noise; synth basslines; real basslines; drones; the kitchen sink) into a loop machine - and a drummer who does his best to work out what's going on and stick a beat on it. It doesn't always quite work - one track gets abandoned after the second failed attempt - but when it does it's a thick Krautrock space-groove soup. Unfortunately there are more technical hitches towards the end that leave a lot of people shrugging in bafflement, and a decidedly thinner crowd than when they started which must be pretty demoralising. Lots of good ideas, but some lost in the actual execution.

http://www.myspace.com/upthelaw

http://www.myspace.com/telegraphs

http://www.myspace.com/copyhaho

http://www.myspace.com/unicornkid

http://www.myspace.com/youngrival

http://www.myspace.com/hookandthetwin

It's horribly dead (and absolutely bloody freezing) in the No.1 Club (formerly One Central Street), the bouncer says it has been all night, last night too. Tonight's a Brighton Live showcase, and I'm fairly sure myself and photographer-about-town Shirlaine Forrest are the only people here not from Brighton (and possibly in or with the bands). And I'm largely here because I saw Heels Catch Fire down there recently and they were great; here the obviously demoralising effect of the small crowd coupled with a decidedly ropey sound system sees them a bit under par to start with, but they do pick up.

They have an interesting line in edgy angular art-pop: interesting because it doesn't just rely on the post-punk stylings generally associated with such things, but is equally informed by the noisier likes of Sonic Youth and the more recent post-hardcore scene. So there are jerking rhythms alongside crunching noise; gloomy basslines and energetic guitars. The drummer, who's shirtless and looks like a Brazilian footballer from the 80s - is an absolute joy to watch in his own right as he piles his whole body into the kit. It's always good to see a band who take a few well-worn ingredients and create something quite original from them. Even if there aren't too many people sharing the experience.

Walking through near-deserted streets back to Ruby Lounge I'm quite saddened by how quiet the whole thing's been this year. I've seen some brilliant music today but the general atmosphere has been somewhat downbeat. Obviously the recession's taken its toll; there just aren't as many record labels or music magazines as there were five years ago (maybe it's just the rosy tint of nostalgia, but I remember ITC04 - or even as recently as 07 - being like a great throbbing weekend-long party), and those that survive are doing so with greatly reduced staff and budgets. This might also account for the lack of international showcases which I have personally really missed this year; whether it's an Icelandic alt-rock band all dressed in gonad-crunching shiny gold trousers (Skatar, 1007), the delights of listening to someone check microphones by counting to five in Finnish (Boomhauer, 2004) or being completely blown away by a teenage Japanese post-rock orchestra (Siberian Newspaper, 2006) these often provided the unexpected highlights of the weekend. Where are the big buzz spectaculars? The high profile artist special guest slots? I am aware of one well-known "big indie" band, as in top ten album and Mercury nomination level, who were pencilled in for an event but clearly nothing came of it. And no Sunday afternoon delegates' free bar special, either; I've been quite cynical in past years about that and I can't say I personally even noticed its absence until now (for us here at MM it genuinely is all about the music), but it's a telling sign of an event whose budget doesn't strech as far as it once did.

Daytime live music events have been somewhat thin on the ground, too - little on Monday and nothing at all Tuesday, where in previous years you used to get three full days of twelve hour venue-hopping. The relatively recent shift to Sunday-Monday-Tuesday is probably the main reason for this; a shift which has definitely affected the attendance from non-delegate non-music-scene members of the public, too. Your average Joe Punter is just less likely to want to go out from seven til midnight than he would at the weekend. The £20 wristband scheme has turned the public away too: until a couple of years ago most sessions were free entry for all. I guess they looked at the success of events like Brighton's Great Escape and its plethora of offspring, and figured people don't mind paying for those - usually 30 to 40 quid for three days or a tenner or more for the single day ones, so on the surface £20 isn't bad value for money at all, but on the other hand people don't generally like paying for something they didn't used to have to. And even if it doesn't deter the serial gig-goer, plenty of people (my friends, for instance, or myself back in the days before I was writing for MM) would probably pop into two or three gigs and make a night out of it. There were, of course, plenty of gigs this year which were free to all - the No.1 Club session I've just come from, for instance; some other Peter Street events as well as the Bay Horse days and other fringe events, but this wasn't made massively clear to people. This year it feels like In The City passed a lot of Mancunians by.

At the time of writing I've just been interviewed by a media consultant about why In The City is good for Manchester - and as a conference and seminar of course it is. It brings the world's music media to our doorstep, throws a spotlight on our city. But I do feel something needs to be done to bring the public back. Because you read the stories of how in recent years bands got signed on the back of an outstanding performance in a packed venue - and they're not just myths, I actually know some who did - it's not the same for a band just playing to a handful of people with passes around their necks.

Ruby Lounge is once again my final stop of the night, and the reason is simple - back in May at Great Escape me and my mates were intrigued by one of the names on the schedule: Ou Est Le Swimming Pool. We knew absolutely nothing about them but a band with a name like that just had to be seen. Only we forgot to actually go and watch them, and I have managed to not see them at several other festivals since then. We made the same mistake two years earlier with The Airborne Toxic Event and when we eventually discovered they were a great band as well as a great name we all rather regretted it.

Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, however, would have been probably best off left as a comedy name on the schedule: the reality is rather disappointing. Unless you're a fan of rubbish 80s disco pop. The first track sounds like The Scissor Sisters but without any of the charm: instead of flamboyant androgynous New York City club queens we get a bunch of Shoreditch scenesters-by-numbers. The backing tracks - provided by a serious-looking type in a suit and a slightly less serious looking one with a multicoloured scarf wrapped round his head - are decent enough, but the frontmen let the side down: the bleach-haired singer attempts the old high-pitched disco thing but is lacking in any sort of soul, and I can't work out what the other one's even there for. Third track "Better" is, yes, better. A bit Pet Shop Boys, even. Thing is I just can't lose the overriding feeling that I've landed in a suburban Nite Klub circa 1986, possibly called Cinderellas or something. Maybe I'm being a party pooper but no, this is grade one Emperor's New Clothes. They will probably be massive in about three weeks.

Time to go out again already? I've still not got a plan, but I seem to have managed OK without one so far... I'm very much feeling the effects of three days' full-on gig-going in case you were wondering, yes, I do sometimes get tired. And I could really do with not having to go out again. But there are bands to see, and I wouldn't want to miss anything. A couple of hours later as I stumble out of TV21 trying to process what I've just experienced I have completely forgotten about being tired. Welcome to Cath's Day Three, in which I only see six bands but every last one of them is absolutely brilliant. This is why I do this.

Right, so there's no official Japanese showcase this year, but I seem to have found the unofficial one. Brilliant! It's brought to us by all-ages promoters XOX (leave your drinks at the door) down at TV21 and, well, there's two Japanese bands in a row followed by one with a Japanese synth player so I suppose it sort of counts.

We first encountered Bo Ningen at this September at the ultra-hip Offset festival - I'd like to say "saw them" but in reality I could barely poke my head inside the overstuffed tent. This excuses me having thought hyperactive, helium-yelping singer/bassist Taigen was a girl - which here in his skinny bare-chested glory he clearly isn't, although he does have a girl's haircut. Two, in fact, simultaneously - a pretty 60s fringe and bob at the front and luxuriantly long and straight tresses at the back. Guitarists Kohhei and Yuki and drummer Mon-chan have equally long, straight hair and some of them appear to be wearing 1970s pyjamas; they're like four baby Damo Suzukis and the noise they make is every bit as insane. Blisteringly loud guitars do prog, post-rock and metal often within the space of one song, whilst Mon-chan just about steals this year's Animal From The Muppets Award For Drummer Insanity (beating yesterday's Heels Catch Fire into a distant second place) as he appears to be drumming with his head as much as any sticks or accessories. The other three bounce off the amps and pillars and each other as Taigen alternates between Damo-esque rambles and frenzied punk attacks; each track is like a brilliant swirling full-on psychedelic wig-out compressed into a few minutes and with everything turned up to 11. As is often the case with international showcases there's a decent ex-pat contingent down watching them and they're going crazy too, whilst the bloke standing next to me just appears to have his eyes out on stalks for the entire thing. It later transpires he is Ezra Bang whose band's on later and is possibly wondering how the hell they're going to follow this. By the end of the set Taigen is crouching with his legs splayed simulating sex with his bass and Kohhei and Yuki are throwing themselves and their guitars into the drumkit while Mon-chan continues battering it and them, until they all fall over and lie there grinning. Set of the weekend, no contest.

I've long had a theory that there's something about the highly ordered and reguated nature of Japanese society which makes all bands from over there do whatever it is they do about 30 times more intensely than tneir Western counterparts. Japanese punks have the tallest, most colourful Mohicans; indie bands the tightest blackest jeans and most perfect fringes; rappers the biggest gold chains and baggiest sportswear; metallers the most piercings and wildest tattoos... and what happens next makes Bo Ningen look relatively sane.

They're called Asakusa Jinta and there's a raspberry-haired girl blowing a tenor sax whilst pogoing, an older lad with a moustache and a double-neck guitar; others have a trumpet, electric double bass and large curly horn thing respectively (as regular MM readers will know, I've never been any good at identifying brass instruments). In the tiny space in front of the stage there are two tiny Japanese girls trying to start a ska knees-up moshpit. Oh yeah, the music? Just your average everyday mixture of Glenn Miller big band, Bad Manners lunatic ska, a military parade, cartoon punk and soul revue. Proportions of the above vary from one track to the next, although it's hard to keep up as the whole lot is administered at roughly 300 miles an hour. They do something that sounds like "In The Mood" but not quite, and raspberry haired girl is leading the crowd in a sort of one-potato-two-potato hand dance. They do something that vaguely resembles a rocket-powered Can-Can and several of the end up in the audience. And the last of my brain, the bit Bo Ningen didn't melt, holds up a little white flag.

Later I look them up online and discover that "Their base is Asakusa, Tokyo's old downtown, an area reminiscent of traditional Japan. They love this town and people who live there love the band as they are known as a marching band playing on the shopping streets or for weeklong parades." I don't think there's a lot more to be said about this, really. Just try and hold that image.

Oh fuck, there's more.

Ezra Bang And Hot Machine are five extremely cool-looking people variously hailing from New York, London, Berlin and Sapporo, who much like their two predecessors at this event seem to think easily pigeonholed music is for dullards. Ezra raps (mostly) in a sort of Public Enemy stream-of-consciousness style which if he'd decided to plump for a traditional hip-hop style backing would still justify a place in the ones-to-watch list, but where's the fun in doing something there's already loads of? Instead, he's assembled a synth-bass-drums electro band who sound like Soulwax in particularly hedonistic mode. The first track is brutal, euphoric and hilarious all at aonce - the latter largely due to the way synth player Mio Kuromori sings the word "motherfucker" in a really sweet little girl voice between his rap streams. He's all over the front of the stage, fixing people with his eyes, revving them up - but this isn't just party music, there's a politicised side to them as well: "This next song's called 'White Power', er, please take a look at this stage and realise it's meant with a sense of irony..." (Ezra and bassist Sara are black and there's two white lads as well as Mio) - and, it seems, a sense of hard glam-flavoured drumming. Some of which involves a bin lid.

Congratulations to XOX for this triple shot of mayhem.

It's five to nine though and I'd best leave them to it, as the always entertaining Morton Valence are on at ten past at Electric Boogaloo, which used to be... oh god I don't know, some shiny Peter Street identi-bar. There are precisely no taxis on Oldham Street. I run it and arrive just in time. I tell you, if ITC was once a month I'd be fit as an athlete.

Morton Valence are delightfully, wilfully unclassifiable. I've seen them a few times - including In The City 06 - and I'd still struggle to describe them to someone. Suppose I'd better have a go, though, given that that's what I'm here for. At the most very basic level you could call it electropop, but that covers all manner of ills these days. To start with, when most bands make a debut album they collect together their best songs, maybe write a few more and arrange them into an order that works. Morton Valence decided to make an audio romantic novella called "Bob And Veronica Ride Again", with the knowingly Mills and Boon style story also included in a book (released on, um, Bastard Recordings). Some people just have too much imagination. "Sailors", their brilliant early single, is not on it as there are no sailors in the story, but it is a rather excellent piece of skewed and slightly camp thumping electronic pop music which here goes down equally well with the ITC delegates and punters and the after-work drinkers. They're a great visual act, too, with their ironing board keyboard stand and the fascinating are-they-aren't they interaction between the singers Rob Hacker (think: captain of the Yellow Submarine after a long night's raving) and sultry, pouting Anne Gilpin. They're having all manner of technical difficulties so it ends up being a pretty short set but well worth the effort.

It's pushing ten o'clock on Tuesday and I finally give in to the first taxi of the weekend. It's cold and raining and it's a long way from Peter Street to Grosvenor Street. The plan is to see the night out at the Deaf Institute with The Northwestern at 10 and Rogues at 11, but I arrive to find the line-up's been shifted. Rogues went on earlier, there's just The Northwestern to go and it's rather under-attended to say the least, although as the band come onstage a few more people appear - maybe they were hiding in the seats up the back or something...

The Northwestern are the latest incarnation of Sam Herlihy and Simon Jones, formerly of Hope Of The States, and MM was lucky enough to catch one of their first gigs under this name at the Roadhouse in June. They were good then, but three months down the line they've got a whole lot better. There are only four of them now but the sound's so much bigger: single "Telephones" is a case in point, a quite brilliant piece of power-indie with the grasp of song dynamics Sam perfected in his old band very much present and correct. As ever, he's on delightfully chatty form and it's always great to watch a band who clearly love playing life so much it shines out of every chord they play. They still remind me a lot of Ride, with their noisy fuzzed-up perfect pop melodies ("All The Ones" could be a harder, faster cousin of "Like A Daydream") and even Teenage Fanclub - and this is never a bad thing.

I decide to finish the night off at Space purely on the grounds that it's nearby (and near home) and it's still raining and I've done enough crosstown treks these past three days. I really miss FictionNonFiction right now, my traditional ITC curtain call. Still, Friends Of Mine (who've been running this venue over the three days) are only marginally less anarchic; 11pm comes and goes, there's a band in the stage area but they're not doing anything... Twenty past they start, which isn't bad for FOM (we love them really!)

Koko Von Napoo are absolutely, unmistakeably French. I don't know what it is about them exactly, they just are. There's a gloriously retro organ sound, cute and slightly yelpy girl vocals that are oddly reminiscent of Altered Images' Clare Grogan (yes, I know she wasn't French) and big fat echoes of synthy 80s pop - but the good sort, frothy but not insubstantial. They sound like they live in the sort of vibrant primary coloured world you see on kids' TV, eating sherberty sweets while listening to OMD and Stereolab but ignoring the miserable bits. It's basically indiepop done electronic style (with real bass or guitar - being the same bloke who plays both - and drums), twee with spikes, and lovely. Shame there's only about 15 people left by the end, but then out in the real world it is nearly midnight on a Tuesday.

Amazing what a difference 24 hours can make. Monday night I was feeling jaded with the whole thing, but six brilliant and very different bands later I'd be right up for doing it all again. Oh well, I'm sure 2010 will come round soon enough. There might be some sort of closing party going on at the Midland somewhere, but I neither know nor care. I'm not an industry professional. I don't think I want to be. I don't know how many live bands MM has covered this year: I think I managed 28, Jon probably a similar number, and we're still waiting to hear what Tristan got up to (last seen at Morton Valence, so we know he survived at least most of the three days) - I'll be willing to bet the only people who come close are the other people who do it for the same reasons we do: our good friends at Fugitive Motel seemed to mostly see completely different bands from us so go and check their reports out at http://www.thefugitivemotel.org.uk/ in a couple of days when they've got them all online. The professionals were probably all back in their offices in London by the next afternoon, treating music as a commodity. Me I went straight out to see The Twilight Sad at Ruby Lounge, because for us here the music doesn't end when ITC does. I think I probably say this every year... I've now finished cutting and pasting the reviews from here onto the MM site proper, while Jon gets on with planning our tenth birthday celebrations for November. It ever stops... and we wouldn't have it any other way.

In The City - three days of musical mayhem which hits Manchester every October - you'd think I'd be prepared for it but no, every year I get the overwhelming feeling I've done less preparation than the last. Here I've collected together the bits and bobs I've written for ManchesterMusic over the past few days, some of them on the laptop, some on the Gadgetphone, some late at night or early in the morning on my home computer. No edits - partly because I haven't time, and partly because that way you get to live it almost as I did. For the full effect, try running half a mile round the block lugging a heavy bag every now and then... oh, and in a break with personal tradition the weblinks are included in the main text, in case you feel the urge to look something up right away. I hope you do, because really that's the whole point of this: on MM (all this lot was written for MM by the way) and on here. Sorry for the belatedness of this - it''s because it never stops...

My last blog ended with me bleary-eyed on an overnight coach, that being the only way I could go and watch two of my favourite bands in Oxford on Saturday and still make it home to be fully badged-up before the first notes of ITC are struck. I've had about three hours' sleep. But as everyone knows, In The City starts with a big dirty fry-up in Night & Day accompanied by whatever music they decide to throw at you. Today they actually seem less organised than me; after a lot of running about they finally get the first band on at about half one...

Shall we start with a joke? Yeah, why not. This rib-tickler comes from the somewhat unlikely source of Ian "Miserable Bastard" McCulloch of Echo And The Bunnymen, last Tuesday at Manchester Ritz... you ready for it?

OK, now I've got that out the way, down to business. This one should have been posted Saturday night, the idea was to bang it out live from the Saturday night 01.05 National Express, Oxford to Manchester, arrives 5.40am with a 20 minute connection stop in Birmingham. Unfortunately the coach when it arrived was already pretty much full from London, and it was as much as I could do to cram myself into the tiny space left beside a fat person (presumably all the thin single travellers had been "bagged" at intervening stops) never mind get the laptop out. Yep, the ever-glamorous life of the awayday gig addict. At this point you have to imagine a Reader's Voice bubble, Beano style: "But what the hell were you doing on the overnighter when you didn't have to be at work the next day?" Answer: I did. Not the day job - not for two whole weeks now, which is ace - but In The City kicked off at midday Sunday (there were a few fringe shows Friday and Saturday at which I normally make an appearance, but too much else on this year) and due to the extreme crapness of attempting to get anywhere by train at a weekend these days, the first service home from Oxford wouldn't have got me home til about half one in the afternoon. And you know me, who needs sleep when you might miss a band?
 

Three days of In the City mayhem later - most of my reportage, and Jon Ashley's, was posted as we went along at http://mmitc.blogspot.com/ although my personal take on stuff will appear here sometime, probably tomorrow or Saturday. This is about what happened the week before, and it's a good job I'd written most of it by Saturday as it all seems rather a long time ago now...

Last week (or it might have been the week before) The Longcut's brilliant second album "Open Hearts" finally hit the shelves (some months after its download release) - if I tell you (a) it's possibly second only to the Maps album in 2009's astonishingly high quality haul and (b) on Saturday night both of them played excellent sets at a charity event at Oxford's Jericho Tavern, that should explain why I was down there in the first place. And it was The Longcut who kicked off this week's manic stint of ITC warm-up fun with the first night of their tour at Academy 3 on Monday 12th October.

A bonus for the (sadly few) early arrivals is the best set to date - that I've seen - from King Tree And The Roots. King Tree is a bespectacled Cumbrian whose songs are infused with a sense of landscape, a sentence which I realise reads like complete bollocks but I hope you know what I mean. His melodies paint pictures of wide open spaces, with a backing vocalist / tambourine player adding to this - whilst the other half of the band, alumni of (favoured Longcut support acts past)  Nightjars and Polytechnic bring the very Mancunian edgy darkness. The net result is something not a million miles from the likes of The Triffids and the Go-Betweens.

Cats In Paris have also supported The Longcut before, and - very much against the prevailing Manchester wisdom of the time - I really didn't like them; their twisty art-pop all seemed a bit clever-for-the-sake-of-it and lacking in tunes. Maybe it's my state of mind or maybe they've improved a lot, but tonight there are only a couple of tracks like this. The rest of them are complex, certainly; still prone to unexpected time signature jumps and vocal tangents, but in a much more coherent and deliberate sounding way. Or maybe it's because through the powerful Academy 3 sound system - rather superior to that at Deaf Institute, where despite the good reputation of the place I've seen about five of my favourite bands have serious off-nights at the mercy of the sporadically bizarre acoustics - I'm actually hearing them properly for the first time. And there's a lot of Cardiacs going on there. This is good. I miss The Cardiacs.
 

Incidentally (and this itself quite a tangent, I admit) if there is anyone reading this who also misses The Cardiacs, the latest from their HQ is that after a year of rehabilitation following his heart attack "Tim's mind has returned to full functionality and no part of your favourite pop star’s intellect or personality has been found to be absent whatsoever". Anyone who's ever seen The Cardiacs would probably wish to add "...that wasn't already" - in the nicest possible way of course. The physical rehabilitation may take a little longer, but Smith has not ruled out a return to music. Talking of, um, hospitalisation (!) there's a distinct hole in tonight's crowd, caused by the absence of legendary local scenester and famously crowdsurfing Longcut fan Pierre Hall who is sadly currently laid up in hospital with a shattered leg, and now seems as good a time as any to wish him all the best for a successful recovery: if you want to cheer up a really sound person who's having a crap time right now, go and download his new band's excellent single ( http://www.myspace.com/goldenglowmusic )...

Anyway back to the gig. The place is starting to fill up a little, although it's some way off the rammed venue that greeted The Longcut's last headline gig here way back in (Christ, was it really that long ago!?) May 2006, but the band themselves look rejuvenated and ready to go as soon as they burst onto the stage into an energetic take on album opener "Out At The Roots". Stuart Ogilvie, in particular, looks younger now than when I first saw the band five years ago, which is a neat trick if you can pull it off. And for the next hour or so, we simply get a perfect demonstration of The Longcut at their best. There is not another band on this earth that sound anything like them, which in itself is no easy feat - sometimes accused by critics of being a one-dimensional experience this is only because their intoxicating blend of post-rock, electro and post-punk indie is so unique as to be unmistakeable. Of course there has been progress between albums; Stuart seems more confident both in what he's singing (words are more clearly audible in the mix on the newer stuff, and less oblique) and how he does so (higher in the mix and more varied in melody and tone) - they've increased their scope without losing their vision. Even some of the older songs seem to have benefitted - I swear "A Quiet Life" has never sounded quite so expansive.

Everyone's on a high, and the set has been well received; there's going to be an encore, and quietly a crew member slips onstage and erects a second microphone. This can only mean... since the day I got the album I've been waiting to hear this live, "The Last Ones Here", the best thing they've done yet, if it had been a single it would probably be single of the year. Lee's backing vocals are very slightly off key at first and a little nervous sounding, but it is probably the first time he's sung in public. And it doesn't matter. If the greatest of pop songs should encapsulate love and life and death with a sound massive enough to match, then this makes the grade on all counts. One of the best gigs I've seen The Longcut play just got better. There's nothing delights me more than seeing a band I've been watching for a few years suddenly lift off to a higher level - and little do I know at this point they won't be the last this week to do just that.

Tuesday I'm off to The Ritz for Echo And The Bunnymen. Well, that's not strictly true. I've always liked them but I'm not a massive fan, considering them very much inferior - of course - to our own Chameleons, and whilst I usually go and see them when they come round I wasn't going to bother this time, being a bit on the expensive side. £23 or so is quite a lot for a band who are notorious for their very bad off nights. It's much the same reason why I rarely go and watch live football. Then a couple of weeks ago, Exit Calm were confirmed as support. Oh no! It's bound to be sold out by now!  But no, it isn't. Maybe I'm not exactly alone in my assessment.
 

There's a decent turn-out for them too, considering the 7.55 stage time. A fair showing from the regular crew, a fair few Bunnymen fans clearly there deliberately early to check out the support, and general early arrivals further back. Most of whom are quite comprehensively drawn in over the course of Exit Calm's set. The problem with having really long songs when you're a breakthrough-level band is that these all-too-crucial support slots don't exactly leave space for many of them: you have to choose well, ansd this is where Exit Calm excel: the fluid, spaced "You've Got It All Wrong"; their contender for that Best Spiritualized Song Spiritualized Never Wrote award "We're On Our Own", the infectious dub psychedelics of "Don't Look Down" and then the final and quite astonishing "Hearts and Minds" - one of the newer songs in a repertoire which boasts plenty more where these came from, with some of the stuff Rob Marshall is doing with his guitar I have absolutely no idea how he's even creating the sounds. Afterwards, various friends of mine who've never seen Exit Calm before but made the effort to get there in time are very glad they did, and the general reception from the crowd is deservedly fantastic. A couple more of my mates are just arriving as I slip out for a smoke: "You've missed the band", I tell them, "just the cabaret to go now". I'm only half joking.

The great thing about watching a band with little expectation of greatness is that it's hard to come away disappointed. In this case I come away (mostly) impressed. Things to try and forget: the fact that Mac appears to be using an autocue; the collection of double chins visible on his once model-beautiful face when the smoke-machine abates for longer than it probably should; his horrible little cabaret turns whereby he splits a perfectly good song in half and sticks a medley of cover bits in the middle; the fact that the new material is a bit average, due to the Mac:Will ratio being rather more singer-biased than on 2005's stunning return to form "Siberia".
 

Why it's a brilliant gig despite that: "Villiers Terrace", "Seven Seas", "Silver", "The Killing Moon", "Bring On The Dancing Horses", "Stormy Weather", "Back of Love" and the ever astonishing "The Cutter". A pretty impressive collection of hits, both genuine and nominal, from across their improbably lengthy career. Improbable not just because of the deaths and the drug addictions, but because you ofetn get the impression even as an audience member who knows nothing of the band personally, that Mac and Will really don't like each other that much. There's the same sort of grudging tolerance which could explode at any minute that you get with Jim and William Reid, or Noel and Liam Gallagher - except unlike those duos these brothers are not genetically so, not tied by blood; maybe after all these years - 31 in total now if you ignore the relatively brief periods of separation - they just couldn't live without each other. On Mac's second foray into low-rent Sinatra mode - specifically the unnecessary violation of the beautiful "Nothing Lasts Forever" with "Walk On The Wild Side" in its entirety - a mate closer to the front than me swears he sees Will making a 'wanker' sign behind the singer's back. Ego trips aside, though, (and would we actually have him any other way?) Mac seems to be in a relatively good mood and on decent form singing wise too. Unfiortunately the evening doesn't so much climax as sort of wander off: "Lips Like Sugar" - a chart hit back in the day but hardly one of their best - is an odd choice of final encore, but they always were a contrary bunch. And long may they continue to be. A surprisingly enjoyable gig and all due to Exit Calm, without whom I probably wouldn't have bothered.

The next of my regular favourite bands to kick off their October tour is I Like Trains, on Wednesday. And I'd forgotten what a miserable dilapidated venue Liverpool Barfly is; only time I've been in there this year was Air Cav's Soundcity gig but that was in the front bar, which might smell a bit weird but at least gives the impression it's seen some refurbishment in the past 40 years. And has some lights in tne bar. And whilst I'm aware that I Like Trains are, I suppose, effectively unsigned these days it's still a bit of a surprise to be asked on the door who we've come to see. I neither know nor care who the first band are, they all look about 15 and play some tuneless grungey prog to their mates. I really feel for ILT, manning their own merch table in the near darkness; they're much too good for this. Sometimes I fucking hate the music industry. Second support The Ambush also have little to recommend them, unless unfocussed mishmash indie floats your boat. The Coral have a lot to answer for. Their Myspace page cites an eclectic mixture of influences, and maybe in time they'll create something original from them, but it doesn't seem to have happened yet. Also, points off for starting by announcing "We're The Ambush and we're quite well known in Manchester..." - this, I can categorically state, is not true.

I have higher hopes for Swimming, though, given that they're doing the whole tour and are therefore probably ILT's choice. The band - mostly drummer Simon Fogal - have DIY'd the whole thing: it's the first night and he looks exhausted, and he knows I at least have some understanding of why.

They're good, anyway, in a really quite odd way. Difficult to pin down, but I always kind of like that in a band even if it makes writing about them quite a challenge. There's certainly a post-rock indie thing going on, but all manner of other stuff too: prog, strange keyboards, um... anyway, I'm on official MM review duty tomorrow, maybe I'll have them figured out by then.

ILT are in civvies, Dave confessing mid-set he'd left his jacket at home and does not like playing gigs in a V-neck sweater. Thankfully neither this nor the venue's limitations manage to spoil a great set absolutely rammed with new material - on which I'll report properly following the Manchester gig, but at this point my favourite is a faster-paced track called "Father's Son" which if you took Dave's vocal off would pretty much be The Chameleons (specifically the guitar line which echoes "Denims & Curls", if you're Chameleons-fanatic enough to be familiar with the Tony Fletcher EP). Also of interest is the presence of a fifth man on stage sometimes; introduced as "our friend Ian who's going to be lending us a few riffs" he adds a third guitar to a few songs which fills out the sound even more than usual. Older stuff wise, they end the set with the best "Spencer Perceval" I've heard, really intense and with an absolutely ear-splitting psych-out ending. If they keep this up throughout the tour I recommend those with a nervous disposition or sensitive ears step back from the front towards the end. I certainly recommend attendance, and again the remaining tour dates are at the bottom of this page.

Thursday the tour hits Manchester. It seems I missed a crucial thing yesterday; just when the headliners have finally stopped being typographically obtuse (and the more obsessive fans argue as to whether or not this is a good thing), along comes another one. The tour support are not in fact called Swimming, but SWIMMInG. Thanks for that.

Friday night sees the band return home to Leeds Cockpit. I didn't actually buy a ticket as I really didn't know if I was going to be able to go - or indeed if I was going to want to do three in a row. I've always liked the band but they've never been one of those where I feel the urge to go all over watching them; this isn't all over, really, though, it's a quick train ride away and after the last two nights I very much do and am so glad it was still possible to get one on the door... turns out to be the right decision, as if Liverpool was good and Manchester great then this turns out to be the best ILT gig I've seen in a very long time and continues the most exciting run of form I've seen them on since maybe 2006. Swimming are growing on me with every experience, and as I'm unable to get to any more dates of this tour I must remember to try and catch up with them at one of their own dates sometime. The sound in the Cockpit on a good night is among the best you can get at a venue of this size - you get a certain power there, it seeps through the brickwork like the whole place is one big amplifier.

This is my friend Deb "modelling" the set-list. It's been much the same over the three nights, the odd change of order, but tonight I don't know if it's the hometown vibe or just that they are really getting into their stride, but everythig sounds perfect. "Sea of Regrets" is astonishingly good, but it would be a tough call between that and "Father's Son" as my pick of the "new" (as in post-album) stuff; to be honest though it's all pretty immense and I really don't want it to end.
 

It does, though - and being The Cockpit, does so in good time to get the half ten train home. I need some sleep, I have quite a weekend coming...

Saturday then. The journey to Oxford is typically miserable - heavily delayed by a staff shortage (hello Virgin? There are lots of people looking for jobs right now, how about employing some?) I do manage to get all my pre-ITC reviews filed for MM, although no thanks to said train operator who may offer Wi-Fi on some services but clearly not this one. Oxford is one of those places that's always further than I think it is at the best of times, and the train finally limps into the station - after sitting within sight of it for a good five minutes just to really piss us off - shortly before I lose the will to live. I pity the poor fuckers staying on til Bournemouth.
 

The Jericho Tavern, like so many legendary venues, turns out to be a rather rough and ready pub upstairs room in the Star & Garter tradition. The bloke on the door has a "Thurston & Steve & Kim & Lee" t-shirt on (one of these days I'll get that John & Mark & Reg & Dave" shirt made, although the order in which I put the names will probably cause a minor political incident). It's that sort of day: the man on the stage - Theo, apparently - is bashing the fuck out of a guitar and drums. At once. ATP has a lot to answer for. No, it's good really, but I'm still trying to acclimatise and it's definitely a throw-in to the deep end of what transpires to be a day packed full of post-rock, alt-noise and electronics. I think I described the afternoon events, at the time, as effectively a matinee Wotgodforgot. There'll be a tidied-up version of this review in the next Incendiary, probably, by the way; this was mostly written as I went along, like a sort of ITC practice run...
 

Oxford might have once been the home of dreaming-spires posh-boy folk (or was that Cambridge? Probably both...) and, later, the cradle of shoegaze, but these days it's generally associated with Radiohead and post-rock. Ute have clearly been inspired by both: the former in the somewhat freeform vocal meanderings, the latter in the regulation off-rhythm drums and non-Euclidean time signatures. They are precisely what I imagine when I think "Oxford band" these days. 
 

Time to "bank" some food before the evening really gets going. Luckily there's a rough pizza shop over the road; the requisite pub music all-dayer BBQ being rather, well, Oxford priced. I mean I'm sure the 7 quid lentil-and-spinach burgers are nice, but no burger - meat, veggie, whatever - should ever cost more than a fiver. End of. Rough pizza shop is also showing the F1 qualifying. Bonus! Back to the venue then (which is running to an impressively tight schedule) for a bit of Bilge Pump. Bilge Pump have been around for millions of years and I actually can't remember if I've ever seen them before. They sound exactly like a band called Bilge Pump should; an abrasive pile of guitar, bass, thundered drums and shouting. And, yes, a bit post-something. Their last song is one minute long and contains more drums than most bands' entire sets. Outside, some young men with beards are debating which is the best Oceansize album. It's that sort of day.

Can you, in fact, OD on instrumental post-rock? I think I'm getting close. But then one comes along that's good enough to prove otherwise. Talons have the other sort of IPR line-up: bass, drums, two guitars, two violins - but your pretty Icelandic elf-music this ain't. They sound like Mogwai in a bad mood. Which is good. No, really it is. They'll also be at In The City in just a few hours; I'd have loved to have seen them again but I'm committed elsewhere at that point. I send Jon A down though and he loves them too.

Bronnt Industries Kapital. Let me guess, you're thinking... Krautrock, right? Electronic Krautrock? Yep. A one man set-up, he is one G Bartell, and he plays bass and a big table of electronics - sometimes with his head. Either that or he just loves his equipment a lot. The bass is mostly in early New Order mode and it's all beautifully sequenced and trance-like; I'll even let him off one count of wearing sunglasses onstage. Not a good look, post Calvin Harris. I look him up online later; he cites his influences as Neu!, Philip K Dick, Giorgio Moroder. This does not surprise me in the slightest.

There is one incredibly annoying feature at the Jericho Tavern - half way back it has a six inch step down, from behind which only the reasonably tall stand a chance of seeing anything. And having popped to the bar I'm not about to try and penetrate the crowd that seems to have appeared from nowhere (although I suppose it is around nine o'clock now, and the final three or four bands would be well worth the twelve quid of anyone who has better things to do on a Saturday afternoon than watch bands called things like Bilge Pump) to watch Remember Remember. A shame - I'd like to see what this avowed fan (yes, another one-man thing: Graeme Ronald) of Philip Glass, Steve Reich and The Durutti Column is actually doing to make a sound which echoes all three. Long ambient tones and shifting melodes, I am really trying to avoid using the word "soundscapes" but - oh dear, there it goes.

Some technical difficulties for The Longcut tonight, the details of which I'm uncertain as I'm still standing at the back - but when the gremlins depart and the scything guitar introduction of "Transition" kick in I make a break for it to find a proper little party going on down the front. I have always seen the Longcut as dance music (in a sense) myself but sometimes crowds seem reluctant to actually dance to it - not here. It's a wildly energetic performance considering the band have come all the way from Glasgow last night, although it seems to end rather abruptly. No "Last Ones Here", but I won't hold that against them.

Maps are about to embark on their first headline tour in the current all-electronic format and as a warm-up this set does the job wonderfully. There are projections and visuals planned for the tour but tonight it's simply the best two-man rave machine you'll see on a stage this year. (Fuck Buttons would be the second best, by the way, in case you were wondering, which I'm sure you were....n't). The sound's not quite right for the opening "It Will Find You" causing James to ask for "more beats" - and he gets them. This is a theme which will continue sporadically throughout the set long after any more beats are actually needed. They're on great form, anyway: back to back great pop tunes "I Dream Of Crystal" and "You Don't Know Her Name" prove there's not actually as much of a gulf in style between the first and second albums as some critics will have you believe, and James chats amiably if slightly obliquely to the crowd causing the couple behind me to have a lengthy discussion as to whether he's "on drugs" or "just been up for three days" (the answer is neither). By the time they get to forthcoming single "Die Happy, Die Smiling" the beats are loud enough to shake the whole building and already the track has developed from its album version into something a lot bigger. I'm very much looking forward to seeing them again, specifically this Friday in the Warehouse Project whose air-raid shelter rave set-up is exactly how Maps 2009 should be experienced.

Brilliant performances from two of my favourite bands, then, and I don't feel so bad about missing the ITC warm-ups. Both manage to sell a few albums to the buzzing crowd. Somehow. Would you let these men run a merch stand?

And then it's the long, semiconscious trip home. Oxford to Birmingham seems to pass in seconds - maybe I did get some sleep after all - and Digbeth coach station has been replaced by a new state-of-the-art one: shiny, white, but still populated by a few teenage punks. Proper punks, Vibrators patch on a sleeveless denim jacket, DMs, union jack tights punks. Only 17. I wonder briefly if I - or they - have time-slipped... But no, they're listening to Oi! through a tinny mobile phone speaker the way other kids do N-Dubz. Maybe everything just seems weird at 3am.
 

Nine hours later I'm sitting in Night & Day wondering how the hell I'm going to manage a 12 hour day reviewing bands. Somehow I do, but that's for the next piece...

http://www.myspace.com/kingtreeandtheroots
http://www.myspace.com/catsinparis
http://www.myspace.com/thelongcut
http://www.myspace.com/exitcalm
http://www.myspace.com/thebunnymen
http://www.myspace.com/anambush
http://www.myspace.com/swimmingband
http://www.myspace.com/iliketrains
http://www.myspace.com/pocketknifeuk
http://www.myspace.com/theo1000
http://www.myspace.com/utetheband
http://www.myspace.com/bilgepump
http://www.myspace.com/talonsband
http://www.myspace.com/bronnt
http://www.myspace.com/rememberremember
http://www.myspace.com/thelongcut
http://www.myspace.com/mapsmusic

THE LONGCUT
Thu 22nd - Liverpool - Evol @ Korova
Fri 23rd - Cardiff - Swn Festival
Sat 24th - Bristol - Start The Bus

I LIKE TRAINS
Thu 22nd - London Garage
Fri 23rd - Birmingham Hare and Hounds
Sat 24th - Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms

MAPS
Thu 22nd Edinburgh Electric Circus
Fri 23rd Manchester The Warehouse Project
Sat 24th Southampton Joiners
Sun 25th Birmingham Hare & Hounds
Mon 26th London Cargo 
Wed 28th Bristol Start The Bus
Thu 29th Cambridge Portland
Fri 30th Brighton Digital
Sat 31st Nottingham Bodega
Sun 1st Nov Norwich Arts Centre
Wed 4th Sheffield Fusion
Thu 5th Newcastle Other Rooms
Fri 6th Nice N Sleazy Glasgow
Sat 7th Liverpool Bumper

What the fuck sort of name for a venue is Start the Bus? I guess I - and you - will probably find out in due course...

So I gave myself a couple of weeks off. I think I'm allowed.

I always intended this blog to be little more than a collection of the stuff I had written for the various websites that are good enough to serve as a platform for my ramblings, with a few words about other stuff I'd seen or heard that I felt deserved a mention. And it's been a hectic couple of weeks for one reason or another so this is basically what this is going to be. I hope you still think it's worth reading, though - there's certainly a rather varied collection of live bands to check out, and one could argue that if I don't remember anything much about a band after a couple of weeks then there wasn't much to remember. I did manage to write some things for Incendiary Magazine - specifically an interview with Maps and a review of his absolutely incredible second album, some meanderings on the subject of Warp records and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a joint piece with Tristan Burke about last month's Orbital gig - all of this and much, much more here: http://www.incendiarymag.com/ - in particular if you have any interest in Fuck Buttons check out Richard Foster's typically bizarre interview with them. Rarely has a band risen quite so well to Rich's unique style.

Anyway where was I? Well about three weeks ago or something (Wednesday 23rd September, to be precise) I was in Tiger Lounge for the lastest instalment of The Plague Doctors' and Politburo's demented club night A Cabinet Of Curiosity, with liver performances from both protagonists plus a long-familiar name to me, but first: Kingfishers Catch Fire.

Or, in this instance, a solo performance from wonderfully flamboyant singer Max Howard. Alone with an acoustic guitar it really is all about that voice, and it's been said before but in this context Max genuinely seems like a man out of time, an import from an early 80s when singers weren't afriad to get a bit over-the-top: close your eyes and it could be the young Marc Almond there. Like Almond, he uses a relatively mainstream pop sensibility to semi-conceal all manner of screwed-up stuff. Russian child murderers? Why not.

"They're the eyes of a walrus you know. They're so human." Not a sentence you often hear whilst attending a live music event, but this is Politburo's Nick describing the creepy projected collage that is the evening's "host" Dr. Leonard Skully. Just check out the Myspace and all will become (a little) clearer, or get yourself down on 28th October and see for yourself.

 
Kizilok is, according to his Myspace, "a solo artist who was born and bred in one of the many beautiful council estates of Greater Manchester" and his classic vintage Chameleons T-shirt is not the only link back to the long-lost legends who still seem to permeate mine and Manchester's musical life after all these years. His guitarist Andy Clegg played in The Sun And The Moon, whilst musical collaborators Mark and Suzy Mills (who are not here tonight, except on a recorded backing track) hosted TSTAM's comeback gig in their Bedfordshire living room a couple of years ago (still one of the stranger nights out I've had, and I've had a few - see here: http://www.music-dash.co.uk/live/archivelive.asp?item=1488 ). Clegg's acoustic guitar is at first not exceltionally audible above the booming and sinister backing track, but when they manage to get the levels right we're treated to some dark psyechedelia with 80s post-punk shadows that's as enjoyable as it is somewhat unsettling. A song about stalking continues the evening's vague theme of uneasiness.

Andy Clegg used to be in a band called Politburo himself but has never seen this one, veterans of Manchester's deep underground since they were barely old enough to get served in the pub. Almost a decade on they're still highly regarded by those in the know, having turned their back on any commercial aspirations in favour of existing in their own space. This space. Today Nick sounds like a drunk Nick Cave and looks like a pre-revolution Russian aristocratic outcast, as they perform in front of a banner that says "Leonard Skully Limited - Tomorrow's Solutions Today alongside a distinctly Illuminati-like logo. They were once upon a time responsible for one of Incendiary editor Richard's most incomprehensible reviews, whereby he wrote "...encrusted with the dirt of ages, a filthy fur coat adorned with heraldic raiment; a jewel-encrusted hand that nevertheless displays chapped and burnt fingernails… A sense of ebullient enjoyment emanantes forth. It’s almost cruel. One imagines Peter the Great presiding over a particularly sadistic banquet; Boyars out on the razz, running amok, pissing in primitive hearing aids and tearing up copies of Stukeley’s Itinerum Curiosum, that sort of thing." All I can add to that is that he is probably right. This is Cabinet Of Curiosity and we didn't come here for singalong pop music, did we?

Oh, sorry, we did. In the parallel universe where Leonard Skully runs the country, the biggest pop act is The Plague Doctors.
 

Now apparently reduced to a duo (we don't really want to know what they did with the other one) they have a distinctly individual take on pop: catchy tunes that bug you for days, with subject matter veering from hilariious to deeply worrying, often in the same song. The graphic slaughter depicted in "We Killed Everyone At Radio One" and equally unpleasant premise of "Snipping Off Your Face" would horrify Middle England if they were ever made aware of them - and as for the one about a reanimated robot Princess Diana (yes, that's her with them in the picture), well... in fact that's three reasons why I actually want to live in Leonard's world.

*
 

Friday night it's off over to Salford King's Arms to catch up with DILE (above) and their brilliant party ska, although they're on at about half eight or something and whilst they seem to go down very well with the early arrivals nobody seems up for much of a dance. It's another band's album launch (much later; we've moved on by then) but even in their short set DILE manage to convince us the album they themselves have got brewing will be a good one.

Meanwhile Martin Bramah's Factory Star (above) are effectively as much the Fall as The Fall these days, both musically and personnel-wise. Which is to say they do a brilliant take on "Hilary" and a few other classic era Fall tunes along with some of their own which are in a similar vein, and as well as Bramah incorporate at least one of the Hanley brothers.
 

Saturday we're off over to Lincoln, to an event which is basically the memorial event for a man called Pat Taylor who passed away recently, held in his local pub the Jolly Brewer and featuring a collection of bands drawn from said pub's regulars. This probably makes more sense if I mention that the event's organiser and drummer in one of the bands Helium 3 is an old mate of ours, and the headline set will be a rare live appearance by Coconut Dogfuck, the loose collective fronted by former Chameleons guitarist Dave Fielding. I'm not sure if I ever met Pat - the couple of long afternoons I've spent in the Brewer previously tended to get a little on the hazy side, but its clientele drawn from the city's alternative scene are all very friendly and have turned out in force. What's even more impressive is that one little pub in a city not massively renowned for its music scene can boast such an impressive and varied line-up. There are a couple of solo performers in a punk-folk vein, one of whom proves the universally true fact that if you want to get a whole beer garden full of people singing along then covering The Pogues ("Sally Maclennane" in this case) is a very good way to do it, and then it all goes a bit... metal.

I admit I'm often the sort of person who runs screaming for shelter when faced with the combination of thrashing hair, crunching guitars and guttural vocals but there's nowhere to escape to right now and - admittedly from a point of view that's best described as uninformed with respect to the genre - Def Nation do seem to be actually rather good. Ostensibly hardcore with screamo flavour, one of them is wearing a Nine Inch Nails shirt whose influence is also audible.  Another of them is wearing a hand made shirt proclaiming "more metal than your mum's kettle". This is also true, as my mother has a plastic kettle these days like most people. Joking aside thought they're energetic, loud and a lot more enjoyable than I'd have expected. Next up, the delightfully distastefully named Dead Baby Parade play off a foundation of traditional rock with psychedelic, folk and prog elements - and a flute. That combined with the heavy clouds of (not all entirely legal) smoke, the last rays of a very belated summer day, and the unmistakeable taste of farm-brewed cider and bright yellow burger mustard all leads to the feeling we are actually at a festival rather than a city centre pub beer garden.
 

Helium 3 are a great example of an underground musical movement which is becoming increasingly popular across Britain but which will never, ever make it to the pages of the music press. In which Kizilok from earlier in the week could also be categorised. It is apparently perfectly acceptable to play music whose influences derive entirely from times long past - often the post-punk years of 1978 to 1982 - so long as you weren't actually born when the original bands were about (or for some years after, these days); it is also perfectly acceptable to appear on a stage playing original music in your 40s so long as you were "someone" in your twenties and people have heard of you. There exists, however, a growing number of bands made up of middle-aged friends who got together down the pub, wrote some songs, rehearsed them, and started playing live - much like young bands do. And here's the thing - just like the youngsters we see treading the boards at unsigned nights across the nation, some of them are really quite rubbish and some of them are really quite good. Helium 3 are very much in the latter camp, with a set of songs that are not a million miles away from what Martin Bramah's doing these days and also show the influence of Magazine and early Cure (and that's before they've covered "10.15 Saturday Night").
 

And so to Coconut Dogfuck. Whilst Mark Burgess and John Lever (separately or together) continue to make use of The Chameleons' name and songs, Dave Fielding seems to have landed in a slightly different bit of retro territory, specifically the psycedelic techno rave scene of the early 90s. It's at least partly improvised, backed by a pile of hypnotic trance beats and bleeps: Eat Static, the classic "Trance Europe Express" compilation, the trippier end of Warp's catalogue and Megadog parties spring to mind, along with the thought that what they say about the 60s is possibly true of the electronic scene of 1993-4: if you can remember it clearly you probably weren't there. Which could also be said of this afternoon, come to think of it. Whatever, Coconut Dogfuck are absolutely spaced out to fuck and bear very little resemblance to any of the music for which Fielding is best known - although the sound he makes when his E-bow touches his guitar strings would be recognisable anywhere in the world. He looks weakened by the illnesses which have troubled him over the past couple of years, as if a strong breeze might take him; he seems slightly nervous for a man who's graced the stage of a sold-out Academy and venues across the globe - but he can still do things with a guitar that nobody else in this world can, and the rest of the band provide a quite brilliant foundation on which he can do so.
 

I'm quite sure some people will have noted my absence from the recent Burgess / Bushart gigs alongside my attendance at this one and will try and read into this something political that isn't there: as I have said many times I respect the right of any ex members of any bands to do what they choose with their own back catalogue or not, but the music will always come first for me and if I would rather spend a Saturday night in trippy techno land than wallowing in guitar nostalgia, that's a matter of personal taste with respect to where my head's at right now, and nothing more.
 

Note to readers: do not listen to Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" whilst driving on the M180 near Scunthorpe. Autobahns have no speed limits; the M180 does. And while I concede that 84mph on a motorway is technically illegal, it was a deeply umpleasant surprise to receive a ticket for it. I spend most of the week - indeed the rest of the month - sulking and don't go out again til Thursday.

Good grief, is it October already? Seems it is, and the month of mayhem starts at Kro in typically lively form with the first gig in ages from Frazer King. It must be noted at this point that I have a flight to catch at some ungodly hour in the morning which requires getting out of bed at 4.30am, which doesn't bother me too much given that the band are scheduled to be on at 10pm. Except this is Friends Of Mine, Manchester's most legendarily "not strictly on schedule" club night, and when we get there we're told 10.45. A chance to see the preceding band Bugs In Ember though who've been on my list for a while.
 

Spending the first year or so of their existence wilfully eschewing such conventions as announcing their gigs or having a website (much like the headliners, they seemed to enjoy being a word-of-mouth band) gave them something of an air of mystique, a band everyone had heard of but few had seen. So what do they actually sound like then? Well, quite a lot like Mercury Rev: a sort of psychedelic indie country mix but with the sort od grandiose ambition that dreams of Academy or even arena stages. Or if it doesn't, it probably should do. I'd always assumed they'd be a bit, well, weirder than this; in truth, behind that strange name there's some distinctly commercial potential but (thankfully) with the overriding feeling that this was not their primary objective.

Frazer King finally come onstage about half eleven and they've had a few: congratulations due to Tony Boardman, one third of their haphazard frontline, who's just found out he's going to be a dad. As ever, the crew of friends and fans manages to pack the little room; as ever, frontline leader and general master of ceremonies Nathan McIllroy is the last to make it through the throng to the stage area, pint in hand; and as ever, it's like someone has flicked a party switch. I'm not about to try too hard to describe their music; you've either been there or you haven't. Ostensibly it's a splattergun mash of psychedelics, folk, gypsy-punk (Nathan seems to have acquired a small accordion from somewhere), soul and blues, with the relative quantities varying by song; as a whole, it just sounds like a brilliant drunken night out you'll never remember the details of apart from the fact you really enjoyed it. Actually we have had a few at this point, but it sounds like that even if you haven't.
 

We fall out of there about four hours before we have to wake up. Oh dear.

On holiday for the weekend, in Jersey. In Jersey? On Jersey? How big does an island have to be before you're in it rather than on it? Tes, of course there's one of my favourite bands involved. British Sea Power, specifically - who else? I don't mean who else as in who else would I go to Jersey for (there are probably five or six bands I would, simply as I've never been there before and flights from Manchester are very cheap), I mean more - who else would even play in Jersey? The event is the second annual Branchage Film Festival at which BSP will perform their "Man Of Aran" soundtrack. Branchage is an old Jersey dialect word referring to the a biannual local custom whereby blokes from the council go round measuring people's hedgerows and fining them if they exceed acceptable limits, so in the week or two before the due date everyone gets their chainsaws out: the name, it seems, is an elaborate set-up so they can use the pun "A Cutting Hedge Festival". And Saturday night gives us the chance to see a bunch of, er, cutting (h)edge music films and - always a bonus on an away trip - check out some local bands.

First up's a short documentary about Dizzee Rascal which I'd say was probably only of interest to either fans of the artist or the sort of people who would watch pretty much any music documentary; turns out to be really well-made, with some nice animated links; the footage of Dizzee's address to the prestigious Oxford Union is every but as bizarre as I'd thought it might be.
 

Next up is the Soulwax tour documentary "Part of the Weekend Never Dies" which I can't recommed highly enough. Do you have to be a Soulwax fan to enjoy it? No. You do probably have to have been around bands on tour, or have an interest in the stuff you don't, as an audience member, get to see. Tourbuses, motorways, city after city merging into one, anonymous backstage rooms. There are (possibly unintentionally) very funny contributions from LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy and Nancy Whang. But above all, relative unknown director Saam Farahmand seems to have achieved what big-budget "rockumentaries" rarely do; captured the spirt of the band and their music and crowd. You know how audience/nightclub scenes in films never look real, even when they are? These do. Soulwax are headlining in front of 3000 excited hyped up Parisians, beats raging and strobes firing, and we're sat on a comfy sofa in the small draughty upstairs room of a music venue in St Helier watching it on a cheap projector screen, and yet you almost feel like you're there. On top of which I'd always, I admit, considered Soulwax to be a bit of a poor relation of the almighty LCD but after watching this I had a massive urge to see them live as soon as possible. Which happens to be (in Manchester at least) Academy 1 on 16th December - tickets still available, see you there.

It's band time next, down in the main live room. The stage is set with a collection of synths and electronics, which I suspect appeals a little more to me than it does some of my companions, but then they walk on stage and we're drawn to the front...

This is, or these are, Brobots. And they come from another planet. Honest. Their promotional material claims thus: "Brobot 1 is 8 years old. On his home planet he was well known for playing the Ulba-Tron, a guitar like instrument. However unfortunately when they arrived, Brobot 1 soon discovered that the Ulba-Trons frequencies simply cannot be heard on earth, so he learnt to play the guitar instead. Brobot 1 likes hopping, floating in liquid plasma tanks and inhaling Helium. Brobot 2 is 5 years old. Back on the Brobots home planet, Brobot 2 was well known for playing the Dong Ding, a piano like instrument. The Dong Ding however disintegrates immediately if it comes in to contact with nitrogen, so Brobot 2 was left to take up the keyboard instead. Brobot 2 likes human dolls, smelling flowers, and holding peoples hands." You get the picture.
 
What we actually get is some decent, danceable electronica that blend old-school Kraftwerk robotics with 16-bit chiptune and a bit of Whip-style guitar-electroclash, interspersed with a few between-song addresses done through a vocoder set to "silly". Brilliant stuff, then. And do check out the videos on their Msypace. I like these people.
 

Back upstairs, the "headline" film of the evening is the All Tomorrow's Parties documentary: a strung-together collection of fan-shot and professional live footage from various ATPs over the years, odd bits of festival life shot on mobiles, and snippets of colourwashed film of traditional Butlins holidays from the last century (I know we're only a decade into this one, but the smiling redcoats, cabaret comedians and families turning up in roofrack-stacked Morris Minors seem like such a bygone age that "last century" is the only way to describe it). Sounds rubbish? Well, yes and no. I can't, for instance, see it having any appeal whatsoever outside of the narrow constituency of people who either go to ATP or would do if they could ever get their shit together to do so (I'm probably in the latter category, although since discovering the ATP-with-added-Mediterranean-sunshine that is Primavera I probably never will). It has no start, middle or end; the music flickers from alt-legends to relative unknowns in no particular order; some of the footage is Youtube-quality at best, but as random collages go it's a very enjoyable one. Laugh at the punters riding in an industrial bin with entirely predictable consequences! Watch The Gossip performing "Standing In The Way Of Control" some years before it became a hit and wonder if they actually have any other songs! Smile at the all-round good vibes of Daniel Johnston having a sing-song on the lawn! See what Lightning Bolt look like, which you're unlikely to be able to do should you actually attend one of their in-the-audience shows! Recognise that bit of Northern Soul dancing footage from a million Doves gig back-projections and go "surely that was Wigan Casino not Butlins?" And, indeed (in my case) bet your mates that Pavement will be headlining next year, several days before this has been announced, and later wish you'd put money on it (not that the odds would have been too high, realistically). I can't imagine this film being any good at all in a cinema, but sat round with your mates drinking and eating crisps on a Saturday night it's great entertainment.

The next live act, Nailed To The Furnace, are described as "Jersey's very own Death and Grindcore kings". One of our team has already fallen asleep (standing up) so the others carry him home. I give them a chance and find the description sells them somewhat short: it's the sort of abrasive, Fugazi-meets-the brutal-end-of-post-rock experimental-ish racket that I'd probably thoroughly enjoy at one of Wotgodforgot's ear-splitting nights but right now I'm just too tired.
 

Sunday afternoon, the crowd in the Opera House is - as expected - not entirely your usual sort of British Sea Power crowd. There are a few you'd expect to see at regular gigs, but many more who have clearly come for the film / event (it's one of the festival's premium special events). I've not got any pictures because we were up in the Circle, and you weren't allowed to take them anyway. Rather than a support film or band, there's a bagpiper. It's all a bit strange, but that's one of the reasons I love British Sea Power: you end up going to some downright weird stuff. Don't forget a little over two months ago we were at a literary festival in Cornwall. And three of the crew here this weekend are flying straight off to China for the band's first gigs over there - I was tempted, but didn't really have to cash or the time off needed.

It's a year since I last saw "Man Of Aran"; the Sunday performance at the deranged Tan Hill festival (that was another one you just don't get with other bands) was only about the second time they'd done it. Since then they've performed it at a couple of festivals, a couple of standalone gigs I couldn't go to, and of course released their version as an album, and what immediately strikes me is how it's all come together. It feels less like its semi-improvised beginnings and more of a coherent, structured and quite brilliantly executed soundtrack. It's unfortunate that the promotionla posters for the event, beautiful as they were, show just the longtime "core" four-piece band, as it's auxiliary players Phil Sumner and Abi Fry who take a leading roole in the music: Phil sits centre stage with his keyboard and horn collection around him, and it seems to be interaction between him and drummer Woody (stageside so as not to block the screen, but equally to face his bandmates) "conducting" the piece. Credit to Scott Wilkinson, too; never a great guitarist (not that he's ever needed to be for standard shows, being an almost unparalleled brilliant frontman and a great singer/lyricist: not skills required here, though) his cello playing is exceptional, underpinning the whole thing. Which, like any good instrumental post-rock suite (which is effectively what it is, reminiscent of Sigur Ros and the much-missed Laymar), rides the peaks and troughs of the film's action perfectly.

It's not quite to everyone's taste. During the "Spearing The Sunfish" sequence the band whip into a gloriously discordant Godspeed-style frenzy; when it finally ends, fish duly speared onscreen, the white-haired gentleman sitting next to me who's had his fingers in his ears throughout the scene tuts "Thank God". I do my best "you are an infidel" frown and politely but firmly counter "well what did you expect?" The fact is, aside from us five who'd seen it before and a handful of people who are obviously BSP fans and would have some idea (one local fan is simply delighted not to have to travel to the mainland to see his favourite band as he usually does), I'm guessing most people in there had little idea at all what to expect and as such the healthy applause at the end shows it was a success. As we leave, the Opera House is gearing up for the festival closing party - a gala showing of Duncan Jones's "Moon" - and there standing at the door greeting arrivals are the two Brobots. Of course. Every small island should have its own resident techno spacemen, shouldn't it?

Again, I completely fail to go out again until Thursday. Given that from tonight onwards I've got 28 consecutive nights of gigs planned (if indeed I survive them all) I think this is OK.

I'm not, as a rule, a big fan of Mainstream Indie. I do make exceptions though. Researching the Warp Records piece for Incendiary left me wondering exactly what it was that made the home of LFO, Aphex and Squarepusher sign a guitar-based mainstream indie band - and realised their excaption and mine were for much the same reason: most mainstream indie is rubbish, but Maximo Park are good. Almost five years since I first saw them at the Roadhouse on their joint headline tour with Clor, I have to admit I have not really got into their third album at all, but they've never failed to be good live so it's off down to the Apollo to party like it's 2005.
 

You know your life's been rushing past when you can feel nostalgic for four or five years ago. Back to the days when Thursday for any discerning Mancunian follower of new music meant High Voltage at the Music Box, where one night in 2005 a strange little trio from Liverpool blew our brains out. They were Hot Club De Paris, they looked like choirboys, swore like sailors, sang like a barbershop group and played their instruments like time signatures hadn't been invented. They never really made it but never went away either, releasing a couple of albums to date on Moshi Moshi and touring the toilet circuit, but it's been a while since I've seen them and having discovered only on the day that they're supporting I'm not sure what to expect. The answer: a set that's not a million miles away from what I remember. Sure, there are newer songs (although I recognise more than I'd thought I would) and they can't exactly do the a cappella bits on the Apollo stage, if indeed they ever do them anywhere any more. But basically it's jerky math-pop with harmonies and a bit of chirpy and mildly sarcastic banter, enjoyable if rather of its time. I'm not the only one who thinks this - the lad stood next to us turns to his girlfriend and says "They sound like a band from about four years ago".
 

Stage entrance: it's not the single most important defining factor of live performance, but it's certainly one of them. The way, for example, Mark E. Smith shambles on, hunched and muttering - I've at least one mate who reckons all Fall gigs, even good ones, go downhill from that moment. Maximo Park's Paul Smith is the polar opposite: the band wander on and start playing, then he cannonballs out of the wings, limbs all over the place but hat intact. I read once that he requires specially-tailored trousers with crotch reinforcement because of his onstage athletics. You can't not be impressed by this.  It's an odd start to the gig, though: an early B-side followed by three off the new album. That said, I wouldn't complain if one of my "regular" favourite bands did this (British Sea Power do much the same); thing is however great as it is to hear "A19" (much nicer than driving on the fucking thing) the new material still doesn't seem to pack the punchof the older stuff. It's not because I don't know it, it's just, well, maybe the tradition of The Difficult Third Album is alive and well after all. The brilliant "Apply Some Pressure" comes along just in time to stop them losing me.

It's not just the new material being less instant; Lukas Wooller's keyboard is one of the reasons Maximo Park are better than your average mainstream indie band and tonight we can hardly hear it. This is compenasated slightly by a brass section (think more colliery band than ska / soul crew) but I'm afraid I find myself just looking forward to songs I recognise. That recent single "The Kids Are Sick Again" is one of them tells me that the new album's not bad, it's just maybe a slow-burner that needs time it may or may not realistically receive. "The Coast is Always Changing" is as great as it was back in the Roadhouse the week the single came out, but it's the encore that flips this gig from a pretty average one to something better. "This next one's got a lot of talking on it" comments Smith, and in all those five years I have never heard it live: "Acrobat", a great spoken-verse-sung-chorus classic that stands only just behind The Stranglers' "La Folie" and The Whipping Boy's "We Don't Need Anybody Else" in the great canon of such; the brass really adds something. And of course they finish on "Our Velocity" because it's one of the best pop singles of the decade.

I apologise for the lack of pictures here: I did actually have a camera on me, I just forgot to use it...

Anyway, Saturday again. There is a bit of journalistic licence involved here I'm afraid, as I do actually know one member of this band and have done for a lot longer than they've been going... the rest of it, however, the undercover band bit, is all completely true - and we wouldn't have had a bloody clue where the place was had we not had Alex with us.

And there we have it. As ever, I have been to a gig since then. It was The Longcut, last night, and I'll report on that more fully next time round but I have to say if you get a chance to catch them live over the next week or two don't pass on it. Other regular favourites Maps and I Like Trains also have tour activity imminent: Trains' starts tomorrow; Maps' from the 22nd, although there's a pre-tour appearance in Oxford this Saturday (17th) at which the Longcut are also appearing. And then there's In The City, Manchester's annual attempt to overload me with live music. I'll be blogging sporadically throughout at MM's ITC microsite, the address of which I'll stick up in a few days, and I'm hoping to be able to keep a bit more on top of things now as I am the proud if slightly scared owner of one cheap but impressive laptop. So I'll see you somewhere along the way.

http://www.myspace.com/acabinetofcuriosity
http://www.myspace.com/kingfishermusic
http://www.myspace.com/kizilok
http://www.myspace.com/politburohq
http://www.myspace.com/plaguedoctors
http://www.myspace.com/dileband
http://www.myspace.com/martinbramah
http://www.myspace.com/defnation
http://www.myspace.com/dbparade
http://www.myspace.com/heliumthree
http://www.myspace.com/bugsinember
http://www.myspace.com/frazerking
http://www.myspace.com/brobotsyeah
http://www.myspace.com/nttfjsy
http://www.myspace.com/britishseapower
http://www.myspace.com/hotclubdeparis
http://www.myspace.com/maximopark
http://www.myspace.com/technicoloursoul

Worst title ever. Sorry. Brain has given up... luckily I wrote this largely before that happened...

"Tameside is ace. so far we've had 'man killed by bus in betting shop horror' and 'drunk woman kills cat with crossbow' what next?" - just what you want to read when you're having a quick check of Facebook before heading off for a night out in Ashton, cheers Alex!

Various promoters over the years have seen the potential of the Witchwood for something other than its regular diet of reformations and tribute acts (local heroes DILE and their associates excepted), but in truth it takes a brave soul to take on the task; Thursday sees the second instalment of Liam from the Tides' tenure, Routine Life, and it's not exactly stuffed full, despite a four act bill for just £3. And not just any old nonsense either - Daniel Land And The Modern Painters headline, warming up for their autumn album tour, whilst the first band on (we missed the solo acoustic opener; we, er, didn't hear him come on! Oops...) is a new band whose name's been mentioned by a couple of people I know - Lost Calm. But it seems if a band aren't local (to the point of having a Tameside address, that is; Manchester doesn't count, and south Manchester at that) or plodding through the hits of yesteryear (we can't actually work out which in theory would be the most depressing experience out of Mild Green Chili Peppers and The Clashed) then the massive crowds of well-oiled Ashtonites (Ashtoniand?) you sometimes get in here don't want to know. There's just a handful of people here for each band - oh, and our mate Hairy Bob who, being legendarily vague, has driven from the other side of Manchester thinking The Tides were actually playing. Never mind mate, you have seen The Tides about 40 times, come and watch some other bands.

Lost Calm, anyway - not to be confused of course with our beloved Exit Calm - come recommended to me by a good friend whose music fan credentials are indisputible (including form, like many of my friends, for planning holidays around favourite bands' tour dates) - but whose interest in 21st century bands is generally limited these days to, um, bands containing ex-members of his favourite oldie acts or people who've supported them. I'm not sure how he came upon Lost Calm. And yes, they sound pretty much how I had expected them to: tunes straight out of 1981 (think U2 or Simple Minds before they got bloated and rubbish - or indeed The Chameleons before they really got into their stride) but with a more up-to-date sound to them - which obviously can only mean one thing. They sound a bit like Editors. I saw Editors playing to a similar sized crowd in Night & Day once and am to this day stunned at how much of a career they have made out of how little substance; there will, it seems, always be a market for this kind of commercial take on the vaguely alternative. Lost Calm do overcomplicate things at times; there seem to be too many of them playing complementary parts which works fine for post-rock but less so in a genre where audiences are really after something they can tap their fingers on the steering wheel to. Potential there, nevertheless.

Moscow Square apparently sound a bit like Tool. I am going to take someone's word for this as I actually have no idea what Tool sound like. Chunky hard riffs and harder drums, anyway. We spend most of their set in the smoking yard trying to stop various members of the headline band getting any more impressively pissed than they already are.

This may be one of the last times anyone will be able to walk up on the night of a Daniel Land And The Modern Painters gig, part with a paltry three quid on the door and walk straight to the front of the stage. I'm not going to go into details here, because I've seen them and written about them here millions of times (slight exaggeration - tonight's actually only the 20th time) and am effectively part of the "team" these days albeit in some unspecified position - and anyway, I'd pretty much exhausted my supply of ridiculous shoegaze band reviewing metaphors by about the fourth time. Luckily MM's Jon is on official reviewing duties tonight, and manages "as ever, their set is the sound of a thousand Christmases or the fallout from a hundred love songs". Which means exactly what, Jon? I know I've done much worse, though. So I sit near the front just washed in the echoes and smiling because this band's time is coming.  Sadly, like (in my experience) a lot of small town venues, gigs at The Witchwood do always seem to go on a bit late for a weeknight, and it's practicality as opposed to antipathy that sees quite a few people leave before they've finished.

Friday, Ruby Lounge. A venue where, in contrast, gigs soemtimes get up and running a bit earlier than you'd think. My attendance has been requested, no less, at this one - and I've gone and missed the first band because I was finishing my tea. Oh well. The second one load the stage up with so much electronics I'm half wondering if they're playing a gig or building a time machine, but that's never a bad thing is it? and then...

There are a couple of people wandering round the venue who've caught our attention. One is a young lady dressed in red silk lingerie and tight shiny knee-length boots. The other is a young gentleman in stonewash jeans, a sleeveless T-shirt and one of Bjorn Borg's 80s feathercuts complete with slimline headband - and a glowstick. He might as well be wearing a badge that says "Electro Fashion Casualty". Needless to say we're delighted when both of them head for the stage. The ManchesterMusic office was slightly disappointed when Dead Fluffy Duck changed their name to something rubbish we've already forgotten; a line-up reshuffle and another rebrand later this is Tidy Hooker, and they still make the filthiest, darkest, fuzziest electro-rock around. Love your Whip and Delphic but wish they weren't quite so polite? Prepare for the hurricane that is frontman Jay, flapping around the stage and working the barrier like one of those big dogs that's equal parts overfamiliar and possibly homicidal.

There really aren't many frontmen who could draw almost the entire crowd's attention away from the other two - mullet boy Nick plays guitar, whilst Kirsty does backing vocals and dances in a manner that is, er, more usually associated with a paid-for arrangement - but then it's Jay as opposed to Kirsty who sheds an item of clothing per song. Thankfully only up to a point. The guitar sounds like it's actually trying to start a fight with the sequencer, whilst a live drummer enhances the relentless beats; the sound is reminiscent of those full-on 80s post-punk electro-mentalist bands like DAF only snarlingly Mancunian. As such, we're pleased to see "Miles Platting Assassin" has survived from their former incarnation, too - a tune that lives up to its title. By the time they've finished, we actually feel slightly dirty. But in a good way.
 

Saturday afternoon is spent at Modern Painters HQ in Northenden (exclusive studio shot!! above) listening to some of the final mixes for the album, which I can tell you now is going to be something amazing. Had this been released last year - or most other years I can remember - it would have been the undisputed album of the year, but 2009 has been the most incredible year for albums I can remember. I've almost worn out my promo of Maps' "Turning The Mind" waiting for the official release date of 28th September. One week later sees a triple attack of momentous proportions: The Longcut's "Open Hearts" finally gets a physical release (the pre-order for this came with a full set of MP3s way back in May or June or something; an early contender for album of the year I had no idea of the competition it would face!) whilst The Twilight Sad and Fuck Buttons unleash new ones which I'm told by people who have heard them are outstanding. And the most exciting thing about all this? All of the above, apart from Daniel Land And The Modern Painters, are second albums. That much maligned beast of recent years. Up until now, so many promising bands of the 21st century have come out with a cracking debut only to follow it up with a pale imitation; Forward Russia bucked the trend but split almost before it had hit the shops. At last it seems the real stars of the decade are emerging - those who are in it for the long term.
 

Anyway by the time we get to The Canteen at Abode a fairly significant quantity of red wine has been consumed and any plans for formal reviewing have gone out the window - well it is, as ever, free entry so I'm allowed to treat it as a night off. Opening the batting tonight is Infinite Birth, playing only their second gig - well, second gig in this form, anyway. Drums and guitars are in the respective hands of Graham and Lou, otherwise known as  Blood Moon, whilst keyboards and assorted electronics are handled by Salfordian sound sculptor Gary (sometimes just G) Fisher and artist-filmmaker Helen Shanahan. And yes, the result is something greater than the sum of its parts - a multiplication of its parts, perhaps. The format is not dissimilar to what we have come to expect from Blood Moon (we? I am implying here that there may be someone besides me who's starting to rack up a gig-count for an outfit who consider melody and conventional tunings to be potentially fatal) - a single, shifting piece improvised around (I presume) some sort of vague structure. The additional payers however make for a slightly less discordant experience, cushioning Lou's Thurston Moore attacks and Graham's sprawling polyrhythms with warm drones and harmonic oscillations.

It's still pretty out-there for 9pm on a suburban Saturday night though, and Canteen promoter/DJ Leon does look a bit scared at times, like he wishes he'd stuck a sign outside saying "No, stay, there are conventional indie bands on later!" We, meanwhile, feel conventional indie bands (even good ones - you don't get any old crap here) might not really work after that, and the kebab shop wins.

Sunday it's time for UnElectric Circus, ManchesterMusic's semi-regular Sunday night "quieter things" session at the Roadhouse. Unfortunately it's not a bank holiday Sunday this time round, and the venue itself is also rather quiet despite the fact that it's free entry (though we are asking for donations to the MM fighting fund, fighting in this case just to keep athe site online and afloat) - our longtime proteges (who release singles on MM's label Soviet Union Records, a part of the organisation in which I have no involvement) The Tides are all set to start and there's just a few people sitting around the tables or chatting at the bar...

The thing about Liam is that when he opens his mouth to sing all conversations stop. Fronting the full-blooded band you don't always notice; yeah, he's good, but exposed like this he's nothing short of incredible. With just a simple but effective acoustic guitar backing, "Friendly Fire" is the sort of skyscraping showstopper most stadium indie acts would kill for.
 

Another of Manchester's greatest underground talents Danny Saul couldn't be more of a contrast - it's a very ambient start, largely electronic (he is holding a guitar and seems to be playing it, although the sounds emerging are not exactly your usual guitar type sounds) his piece builds slowly like an approaching storm. Sheets of sound which are almost white noise on the surface but buried inside their folds are layers, patterns, pictures; it's not a million miles from the likes of Bridget Hayden - and probably the last thing anyone's expecting at a session like this. Which is brilliant. UnElectric Circus regulars Butler-Williams bring things swiftly back into more conventional territory with some rich, homely indie folk, followed by a double dose of country-ish things courtesy of first Jo Rose (seems to be cropping up at every other gig I go to at the moment) and then Alexis McLean. The shy nervous boy and the chatty, down-to-earth girl, they're like Manchester's own little pocket of America: Laurel Canyon for him, Nashville for her, but both proudly displaying their North West English roots.

"Hello, we're Tim And Sam's Tim And The Sam Band With Tim And Sam... Let's rock!" Um, rock? Tim And Sam? Amazingly though, this three-piece variant does have a pretty good stab at rocking - well, in a rather sweet and lo-fi jangly way. Using just a xylophone, clarinet and drums they're halfway to Arcade Fire which is actually no small achievement; they cover Elbow's "One Day Like This" substituting Guy Garvey with a clarinet - and towards the end of the set they do indeed rock, pilfering the finale from Doves' "There Goes The Fear" - admittedly in a rather sweet shambly way.

When Jon empties the donation box it's got fifty quid on which is pretty good considering - probably more than a quid on average per non-playing attendee. Thank you very much if you were one of them.

Wednesday it's time to reconvene with Air Cav following a lengthy summer break - refurbished equipment, new material, but a favourite old haunt in the shape of Death Disco at Notting Hill Arts Club. This was meant to be headlined by another Manchester band The Vortex, but recording commitments have pulled them out and they've been replaced by the mysterious Mike Strutter Group. Which, after a little research by Chris, turns out to be the latest "front" for one Paul Kaye, best known for his character comedy of which the most successful (I think) is showbiz reporter Dennis Pennis. They're kind of, like, a punk band. So is it a comedy act or what? Nobody's really sure, but I guess we'll find out.

This is The Dallas Guild. Truth be told I don't remember much about them as I'm in work mode, but they do nice indie electropop and have a real vintage telephone which gets used as a mic. I possibly later offend the singer, the outstandingly named Scuta Salamanca, by telling him it's cheesy but in a good way.
 

Air Cav's first gig in a few months goes swimmingly. There's a new tune in the set which continues their gradual shift towards the more psychedelic, almost prog-like side of things. They go down pretty well, too, with the growing crowd. Unfortunately having to shift the gear out means I only get to see about half a song of "Mike Strutter" but frankly it's enough - the last thirty years has not exactly been short of bands playing fiery punk rock in between vaguely amusing sweary audience-baiting blasts from the singer, and if you took away the fact that he is a celebrity of sorts nobody would give a shit, especially not the orange glamour chick who tells us outside that "they're just the best band, they're so exciting!" which might be the case if you had only ever seen about three bands in your life. Don't give up the day job.

Thursday. Blimey, is it that time again? Seems it is - time, that is, for I Am Kloot's Manchester residency - and this year it's shifted home again to the Deaf Institute. A measure of the band's popularity, perhaps - heartening to see it still increasing even after all these years - or maybe the requirement of certain band members to squeeze in a few sneaky cigarettes during proceedings has attracted them here with its handy balconies. Only joking (well, mostly). This is the first of three sold-out nights - a fourth added at the last minute last night wasn't far off - and it's only a tip-off from someone who was there that's got us here for the half eight start. Yes, half eight, no support - how long are they planning on playing for?! The opening "Favourite Sky" finds Johnny Bramwell sounding rather croaky, we're thinking he needs to watch it a bit, there's a long way to go. Oh, and what exactly is it this band have against guitar straps? Bramwell, as ever, supports his acoustic guitar on his leg, foot up on a crate, whilst Pete Jobson forms a sort of C-shape around his cradled bass; must be murder on the posture that. These minor concerns aside, though, they're on fine form.

Friday. I'm doing a lot of MM stuff this week, that's all the green bits by the way... Sometimes it does seem that every band who have ever had a Top 40 hit are currently reformed and dragging their bald heads around the Academy circuit. Often this is a last attempt to cash in on a career long past with little relevance to today's music, to the point where some venues would probably do decent trade in basket meals. This is not like that. You can tell by the fact that the support is Delphic; you don't take one of the country's hottest young bands out on the road with you if there's any chance they might make you look a bit past it. No, Orbital's final tour, after a few years off, is less a reunion trek and more a testimonial for one of the most influential bands in British electronic music. And besides, they were always bald.

Saturday a last minute personal thing takes me a long way away from Academy 3 where Mark Burgess will be fronting fellow ex-Chameleon John Lever's band Bushart to play a set of Chameleons classics, under the group name Second Skin. This was never really planned this way - an independent decision by John to introduce Chameleons songs into Bushart's set was quietly approved by Burgess and guitarist Reg Smithies; Burgess subsequently agreed to do some vocals and the fully retired-from-music Smithies provided technical support to Bushart's guitarists. As ever, there is one name missing and it is that of other guitarist Dave Fielding. Opinions have been mixed amongst fans - some are happy to hear the sings again even with inferior stand-ins for Reg and Dave, whilst others believe the legacy should be left untainted. And Mark and Dave seem to rarely miss an opportunity these days to have a go at one another.  Me? I'll say what I've always said. John and indeed Mark have every right on this earth to sing and play the songs they wrote all those years ago. As do Reg and Dave (the latter still musically active but in the completely different genre of didgeridoo-techno. No, really.) and if they have chosen not to, there could be any number of reasons behind this. If you want to read possibly the most pointless debate in the history of the internet, it's on the band's fan forum - when to be honest it all boils down to one thing really: go or don't, nobody's making you.
 

On this occasion I had chosen to go, admittedly as much for social reasons as for the music, but something came up - and if I'm being honest I was rather pleased it did. Contrary to some fans' view Dave Fielding's guitar was not the sole sound of The Chameleons: it was a four-way thing. However when two of those four components are missing I don't place the show very high up in the scheme of priorities, in much the way that I no longer go and watch Smithies and Fielding's schoolmate David Gedge fronting a "Wedding Present" of which he is the only original member. My ticket went to someone who would appreciate the gig a whole lot more than I could have done. Shame she's a Manchester United fan, but, er, let's not go there... it has to be said though that I thought I was pissed off about Sunday's derby result (if you have excavated this at some point in the future, Manchester United "won" the match in the 97th minute which, even after four minutes' addition for stoppages and another minute for celebration of a late goal, is quite clearly cheating) until I overheard the Deaf Institute's bouncers: good job it's not really the sort of place footballers go, as I doubt any of the red variety will be getting through its door at any point soon...

Sunday I am once again on the back terrace at the Deaf Institute. I think I'm getting old. But there's an interesting thought to be had here too; at a good few of the gigs I have watched from the front at this venue, including several bands with whom I have more than a passing familiarity (Air Cav, Kyte, The Longcut, Maps, The Second Floor), the sound has been - for want of a better word - shite. Whereas those I've watched from back here - Kloot the other night and Holy Fuck spring to mind - it's been brilliant. Coincidence, or are the acoustics just a bit weird? Tonight the rule remains unbroken.

And yeah, I know that was four days ago, I've been rather useless this week. I have actually been to a gig since then but that'll have to wait or I'll never get this thing posted. But you have to remember I do this in my spare time (now made harder by the fact I can't get on Myspace at dinner time due to my work's having blocked it) for absolutely no reward apart from a few free gig tickets and the buzz I get from promoting the music I love to a wider audience. Which is why nothing makes me angrier than some paid, overprivileged so-called professional music journalist putting their own ego first. This week, a certain well known weekly music rag decided it was reasonable behaviour to give the new Maps album to their token hatchet-job man, a sort of low-rent pseudo-rebel who clearly thinks of himself as a latterday Steven Wells, but he's not close. Swells had wit, intelligence, humour - even fey trad-indie bands who were his most reviled targets often relished his sweary rants. He was also a one-off, RIP. This is a pale imitiation, the equivalent of one of those ropey pub tribute acts that actually make you embarrassed watching them. And without even properly listening to this album he gave it four out of ten and a bunch of cheap jibes.
 

This is the modern NME though; a rag which (on Monday) thought it reasonable to post - as top story on its website - video footage of Leonard Cohen collapsing onstage during a performance. Yes, that's right, let's all enjoy watching a 74-year-old man suffer! Sick fucks. Would they have still posted it had Cohen not got up? I'd have hoped not, but now I'm not so sure. I know I have defended the magazine in the past, justifying its diet of lowest-common-denominator schmindie as a necessary sales tactic to keep afloat thus allowing space for the more interesting music which (contrary to popular belief amongst non-readers) did still get featured - usually a few weeks after you'd read about it here (I hear there's this new band called Delphic who are quite good?) but this is it for me, I think 24 years (on/off) of buying NME just ended.

If you take note of just one thing I have written this week I want it to be this: "Turning the Mind" is absolutely not a fucking four out of ten album. I absolutely swear on my life it's not. Personally I'd say it was round about an eleven out of ten album, but my possibly more rational colleague Jon Ashley from MM gave it nine. My own review will be up on Incendiary, er, soon. The promo has been on constant rotation at Aubergine Towers for a month now and visitors including Greg Jarvis (Flowers Of Hell) and Daniel Land have been fucking impressed with it, as well as all manner of people who are not in some of the best bands around today. So who are you going to listen to? Us or some crappy Arctic Monkeys fanzine? It's out on Monday, the whole thing is currently streamable on Maps Myspace, and if you don't buy it I will like you a little bit less.
 

I think I need to go to bed.......

http://www.myspace.com/lostcalm
http://www.myspace.com/moscowsquare
http://www.myspace.com/danielland
http://www.myspace.com/shmoomusic
http://www.myspace.com/tidyhooker
http://www.myspace.com/infinitebirth
http://www.myspace.com/thetidesinfo
http://www.myspace.com/dannysaul
http://www.myspace.com/chrisbutlernoelwilliams
http://www.myspace.com/joroseandthehardhearts
http://www.myspace.com/alexismcleanmusic
http://www.myspace.com/timandsamstimandthesambandwithtimandsam
http://www.myspace.com/thedallasguild
http://www.myspace.com/aircavmusic
http://www.myspace.com/themikestrutterband
http://www.myspace.com/iamklootmusic
http://www.myspace.com/orbitalofficial
http://www.myspace.com/delphic
http://www.myspace.com/zunzunegui
http://www.myspace.com/fuckbuttons

September. Festival season's all but done (although later in this ramble we'll have a couple of last blasts in new and exciting places - well, new, anyway...) and tour season's a month away. A chance for the live music addict to recharge those batteries then? Are you kidding? September, like January and February, is hunting season. Time to find out what new music's been brewing while I've been off drinking cider in fields around Britain - and a big cheers to Jay and Ciaran at Ruby Lounge for a head start...

Wednesday 26th August: "Creatures We Rather Like At The Moment". You've got to hand it to them for that one. This is the venue's new(ish) in-house new bands night, five bands for five quid (I missed a couple. I have to eat, and stuff.) with the basic remit that they won't just take any old crap...

Actually I did see a bit of another band: The Decline. They almost lost me by taking about a week to set up their drumkit (Attention all new bands: don't do this, especially when you're last on and it's getting late) but I had to stay cos I felt sorry for them as they didn't seem to have as many friends as the last two bands, as well as to see if their name was a tacit nod to my beloved British Sea Power. It wasn't. They did kind of Americanised alt-rock with nods to the Foo Fighters, a type of music I neither enjoy nor understand, and as such it wouldn't really be fair to review them formally. I think they actually do it quite well though if you like that sort of thing.

Friday I really want to go and see Maps at Cargo in London, but I don't. It would have been a hell of a trip; bank holiday nonsense train services and the reluctance of any of my London mates to commit to going meaning I'd have had to have battled the motorways there and back - "back" being incredibly late - and common sense tells me to save the colossal amount of money it would have cost me (have you ever tried parking a car round Shoreditch? I did, once, about five years ago, and nearly dropped dead when I got back to the meter three hours later and it requested most of my worldly goods in payment). By the time it's definitely too late to change my mind I'm regretting it, but hey, there are some local gigs I can go to. And I feel I owe Liam Frost one anyway, given that he spotted a post I left on Maps' Myspace when they were both up for some 6Music single-of-the-week nonsense a couple of weeks back roundly stating my intention to vote for the latter - and told me off for it... thing is, by 7pm it's absolutely shitting it down, and Frost is playing at Manchester's most rubbish outdoor location, Spinningfields. See the previous blog entry for my thoughts on this credit-crunched designer ghost town.

Jo Rose is onstage when we get there, and as you can see, someone has had a rare outbreak of common sense and shifted the whole thing indoors. So this is the latest branch of Kro? Looks more like a barn, but as it's clearly not going to be in business in six months this probably doesn't matter. I really like Jo's fragile alt-country tunes but it's not really seven o'clock on a Friday night music, you know? Really need to see him with a band soon. He does have one, sometimes.

Good to see The Answering Machine continuing the grand tradition of "Acoustic My Arse" gigs (copyright John Lever's then-girlfriend, Chameleons gig in Derby, 2001) - it's ages since I've seen them and I'd rather be watching them at full pelt, as would indeed most people, including probably themselves, but this ridiculous venture only has a licence for sort of quiet gigs.

I guess I've just not really got Acoustic Head on right now. But if there's one man who can transcend the limitations and deliver a brilliant performance using nothing more than a mouth and a guitar, it's Liam Frost. And deliver he does - a top quality set of old favourites and new stuff from his imminent second album, interspersed with typically rambling chat - only some of which is directed at his one-time employer Royal Bank Of Scotland whose shiny glass offices are one of the centrepieces of the Spinningfields yuppie ghetto. He ends, of course, with the ever-beautiful "Mourners Of St Pauls" - the end of the decade is approaching and I'm currently working on the Singles Of The 00s that someone will doubtless demand off me; this one's place in the list is a certainty.

A few days later I run into Jo Rose and we still can't work out between us what the fuck this whole Spinningfields business was all about. Anyway it's all over by nine-ish, so making it to Daniel Land And The Modern Painters' headline set at Oldham Castle's bank holiday weekender shouldn't be a problem; we text the band to see what time they're on and the reply comes back "sometime after midnight". The venue doesn't even open till 11. Needless to say, by the time we get there we're pretty drunk, and any attention we may have paid the support bands is somewhat diverted by the breaking news - diffusing across the internet just as Michael Jackson's death did two months ago - that Oasis have split.
 

Do I care? Not really - their sludgy, lazy brand of drivel-topped trad/lad/dad balladeering has been a blight on this city for years; long after the band themselves decamped down south MM still receives the odd "demo" CDR of obvious chords strummed like effects pedals haven't been invented and some sports-casual lagerboy singing about fuck all in an "authentic" exaggerated local accent. And whilst I concede that normally a band cannot be held responsible for those influenced by it (just ask the surviving members of Joy Division) the half-arsed tripe Oasis have been churning out for the past decade was so indistinguishable from their descendants (expensive production aside) that they could be considered to have encouraged it. And yet...

1994. I'm young, flat broke, unemployed, living in a shitty damp ground floor flat in the arse end of Withington; nobody I know's got a job and none of us really expect to get one any time soon as the dying days of the last Conservative government (yes, kids, that's an official Warning From History) drag the country deeper into recession. Musically, Grunge is king, but it says nothing to us: we're not depressed, we're just skint and bored. So the sound of some kids like us from two miles down the road singing "Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for? It's a crazy situation but all I need are cigarettes and alcohol" did feel like some sort of anthem of defiance towards our hopelessness. Fast forward a year: May Spring Bank Holiday weekend, 1995, Whalley Range, and I've just found out I've got a job after being on the dole for the best part of a year and of no fixed abode for half of it and I start in four weeks so I'm having one last lost weekend before cleaning up for a bit. At last I'm going to be able to afford a flat, maybe a car, or just to live a bit. The lad whose floor we're crashing on gets back from the shops with carrier bags full of beer, his housemate comes in from his shift driving buses, the radio's on playing the usual Piccadilly daytime drivel, then "Some Might Say" comes on and we whack the volume right up, light up a big one and pull the curtains open and the sun's streaming through the windows and we're all singing along at about one o'clock in the afternoon. I've not seen those lads since, well, since Oasis last made a decent record to be honest, people moved on, but that moment will stay with me. The lyrics might well be utter garbage but they're oddly uplifting garbage and it felt like a celebration; and even when six months into said job with its soundtrack of daytime radio meant hearing "Wonderwall" more times a day than anyone should have to, there was still a certain feeling of pride that the lads from down the road had made it.
 

I guess from a musical point of view I rather wish they'd stopped making it pretty soon after that. And for all those who argue "ah, yeah, but they must have still have something because loads of people like it" - well, loads of people watch the X Factor, doesn't mean it's good, does it?

Anyway back to 2009, Oldham on a Friday night, where Daniel Land And The Modern Painters are about to take to the stage in front of a handful of tired fans (it's ten to one in the bloody morning!) and a few Castle regulars, some of whom might well rather hear "Wonderwall" for the 7,628th time than watch a new band. But the thing about Daniel Land And The Modern Painters is they never let less-than-ideal circumstances affect them; they'd play as well to 4 people and a dog as they would an adoring Sonic Cathedral crowd. Thus the rich wave of three effects-heavy guitars fills the room and for half an hour this isn't Oldham on a Saturday night at all, it's just a timeless, free-floating slice of dreampopland. The only thing missing is drummer Marcus Mayes, but percussionist Jason Magee fills in brilliantly, his looser sometimes baggy-influenced style giving the songs an additional sparkle. A few days later Marcus confirms he is leaving the band - amicably and for family reasons - Jason will now assume the role full time. All the best for the future Marcus - and as for the band, losing a drummer when you're on the cusp of a breakthrough is not traditionally a bad omen, is it? Just ask The Beatles. Or indeed Oasis...

Daniel Land And The Modern Painters' debut album "Love Songs For The Chemical Generation" is released in November - pre-order it now, here:

http://www.danielland.bigcartel.com/product/love-songs-for-the-chemical-generation-preorder

And a week's a long time in pop music; Liam Gallagher now reckons Oasis will carry on without Noel. Bad news for those of us ageing shoegazers who were hoping for a swift release for Andy Bell in the general direction of a Ride reunion.

Tuesday (yeah, I took the weekend off...) it's down to Centro for what's fast becoming another one of those Default Setting sessions, Revue.
 

First up are a very sweet little duo called Pablo's Finest Hour: Simon on most of the vocals and a guitar, Hannah on other vocals and a violin. Their music is bittersweet and starry-eyed, with well-crafted words, plus a few in French which may well be well-crafted but I haven't got a dictionary on me.
 

Cheap Cuts almost threaten to start the world's indiest fight by taking the piss out of bands who sing in French, but it's all too friendly down here for that. They're one of those bands that I wouldn't even expect myself to like, but I do. Punk-pop-indie with a ska bounce, but with all those words used very much in the modern sense as opposed to a band like DILE whose punk, indie and ska flavours are those of quarter of a century ago or more. There's just something life-affirming about Cheap Cuts though that makes you smile; the tunes are short and catchy, they actually do bounce up and down whilst playing them, and they don't seem to be under any illusions that what they are doing is massively groundbreaking or anything. (Which of course music does not have to be; if - as the old adage goes - talent borrows and genius steals, then arrogance borrows whilst pretending it doesn't). Also they have an ace little wooden rack with their name on and some CDs for sale - cheaply, of course - which is a lovely DIY touch. For some reason I really want this band to do a tour of park bandstands; I'm not really sure why, I just think it would work.

The evening rounds off with a performance from Hayley Faye and her band, who sound like an upbeat acoustic Smiths fronted by a young lady who's not going to take any shit off anyone but doesn't feel the need to demonstrate this by shouting. Check out her single on Surbia if you haven't yet.

Thursday. It's one of those late night truth or dare questions, isn't it - what's your biggest regret? Should have worked harder at school/college/uni and not got stuck in that shitty job? Should have got that boy/girl's phone number, or made that call when you had it? Shouldn't have started smoking? Yeah, we've all got those. My answer, however, for years, has been... well, it's something I'm a bit ashamed of. Cos I've got no excuse. And it's really really bad and to this day it angers me, cos I could have, should have... what was I thinking?!

I know. What a twat. And they did play in Manchester, probably a few times, at a time when I was certainly going to gigs... just not theirs. I guess I'd have been 16, 17, 18 maybe? So yeah, gig going was limited by funds, but... Maybe I never really appreciated how good they were til they'd gone. Maybe it was just that time in my life when I was a bug-eyed little Hacienda kid in a baggy top pretending I was doing loads more drugs than I actually was. But I did see most of the first wave dreampop / shoegaze / whatever bands, sitting (yeah, kids, it did happen) on the sticky carpet in the International. Just not them. But over the intervening years it's their albums which have endured. When was the last time I listened to Pale Saints? Fuck knows. But at least once over this summer's motorway madness "On Fire" got a run out. Saw Luna. They were OK. But Galaxie 500 were three people. And now Damon & Naomi are playing... in Chorlton!? Dulcimer's one of those new-ish bars, bit trendy, bit folky, bit well lit. No shadowy corners to lurk in. The crowd could have been lifted from central casting for such an occasion - a good few ageing shoegazers (the quite respectable looking couple across from me give themselves away immediately by sitting on the floor), a few stereotype Chorlton organic folky sorts, and the obligatory three Oriental types lodged right at the front from the off (although oddly in this case they're lads).

One of my friends has been jokingly referring to Damon & Naomi -  as "Dean Wareham's backing band". Thing is he is only half joking - but in truth it's this duo who carry the spirit of their old band. Naomi Yang does not appear to have aged in the past two decades, whilst Damon Krukowski was always slightly weird looking and now he's slightly weird looking with a bit less hair. Their songs, pulled from across the seven albums they have made since Wareham took his ego elsewhere (if you think I'm bering mean, then read his autobiography "Black Postcards" - even by his own hand he comes across as self-centred and arrogant) echo the dreamy place they came from. From the opening take on Tim Buckley's "Song To The Siren" onward there's nothing to shock or surprise here; Naomi's keyboard is rich and warm, her voice still as brittle as ever, and you wonder how an Oriental-American can have such a crisp English folk tone, whilst Damon's voice is so close to that of his former best friend and bandmate Wareham that it pretty much is Galaxie 500 as they may have grown. I read one recent review which laboured the point that all Damon & Naomi's songs were sad songs and their gamut of emotions could benefit from expansion, but I feel the reviewer was missing the point. There are a hundred shades of sadness here; nostalgia, poignancy, regret, their own stories and those of others. And it feels like a truly special gig - the only downside being that having rather neglected to keep up with such things I now have rather a lot of albums to buy...

Friday I'm back in Chorlton, and beginning to realise how lucky I've been for the past ten years having pretty much all of Manchester's gig venues within walking distance. But with several bars now operating as live venues down here Chorlton is getting quite a lot of good gigs these days, and it was of course Blowout who pioneered this rise five or six years ago by sticking up-and-coming bands on in the otherwise very traditional Irish Centre. They soon moved into the city centre, but after a fallow period after their Bierkeller base closed the session's re-established itself here so I'm off onto the 86 bus yet again. I'm only really down to see The Second Floor, but I manage to catch the preceding Sea Devils who initially sound like a bit of a regular indie band but closer inspection reveals all sorts of strange psychedelic influences going on in there.

This is the third time I've seen The Second Floor since they re-emerged earlier this year and by far the best.The sound is perfect and the new material has really come together now - for the first time it feels like they could exceed what they did before. The stereo vocals on "Wash Away the Weekend" are incredible, and a new version of "Rightfully Mine" is another highlight. They just look so fucking cool, too - even if the instrument swapping between Crosby and Cottee (yes, they have first names; no, we don't need to know them) is slightly complicated by the former's left-handedness - it's not as if they can share a bass. Good to see one of the north west's finest bands back on it, anyway.
 

I can't really be bothered to stay and watch the headliners - they're not going to beat that.

So to the weekend, and the last blasts of a festival-packed summer. And for me, the most enjoyable this year and the past couple of years have been the smaller-scale things; the ones you basically go to because you live locally or because a band you like is playing - usually the latter in my case. And from this point of view you just never know what you're going to get. Music aside, you might find yourself enjoying locally-made pies and cider and gazing upon stunning gardens where peacocks wander freely in the evening sunshine - or you might end up on a soggy playing-field just outside Milton Keynes where ticket sales have barely scraped three figures; the only refreshments are van chips, instant coffee and Sambuca, and even the bands you've come to see have no idea what they're doing there. These were my experiences of two consecutive weekends in September 2007, and effectively represent the extremes of the Small British Festival. Two years and a great many weekends in various fields later it's time for a couple more forays into uncharted territory: the season's drawing to a close as the sunset creeps further down the billing, and Saturday I am off to.... Bingley.

Yes, Bingley. As in Bradford And. Somewhat overshadowed by its southeasterly big brother it's really not the sort of place you'd visit without a reason: "Everyone's going to Bingley!?" exclaims the perplexed member of staff in the information booth on Leeds station when I ask him which platform we need. They bloody are, as well; the tiny local train is rammed and we hear "I've never been to Bingley before..." from various directions. Off the train we join a thick procession as it's easier than getting a map out; turns out the park is literally over the road, anyway. The sunshine forecast by the BBC certainly isn't evident although at least the rain's holding off - mostly - and the mud from the previous day's downpour is only shoe deep; we're here, really, to watch headliners Doves on the grounds that they'll be doing a full set and the £15 day ticket's cheaper than their own recent gigs; the rest of the bill being a mixed bag to say the least.
 

The lower end of the bill mostly comprises the sort of random unsigned stuff you always get at such things, although what we assume must be some band the organisers found in the pub actually turns out to be major label artists Detroit Social Club. I'd always thought the stereotype of coke-frazzled A&R men was a bit of a myth these days, but I hope whoever signed this shower was on drugs at the time, as there's no other excuse I can think of. And why the hell are they covering 90s chart dreg "Unbelievable" by EMF? Oh, they're not. It just sounds like it. The Dykeenies also pass me by completely, although this is more to do with the fact that even by mid-afternoon there's a good fifteen minute queue for the somewhat under-numbered Portaloos; there's already a "trench of stench" forming behind the row as blokes can't be bothered waiting (the general consensus amongst the girls around me being the usual mixture of jealousy and relief that there aren't twice as many people waiting) and I frankly dread to think what either's going to be like later.

The Sunshine Underground are always good live, and with a massive following in and around their Leeds base are actually playing to an appreciative crowd. And as far as the upbeat punk-funk-spiky-indie-disco sound of the mid-00s goes, this lot do it better than most - quite why they never made that full leap to the mainstream is a bit of a mystery, although the cynic could cite their fiercely independent spirit and refusal to decamp to London. Somewhat appropriately the sun does actually poke through the clouds for a bit during their set, and we're in good spirits... briefly. Until we try and get to the bar. It seems the toilets are not the only area in which this festival is seriously undercatered - I'm twenty minutes queueing this time and get back to the bar queue to find my companion has moved about four metres. During this period I have had plenty of time to contemplate the enduring popularity of the next act on the bill, Ocean Colour Scene. A band whose riffs had barnacles on when they first unleashed them in the 90s, they seem to tap into a sort of universal nostalgia for a time we don't even remember - even I have to concede "The Circle" and "The Day We Caught The Train" are decent tunes by those standards, but reviving them now seems like nostalgia squared. Maybe they saw the Oasis implosion coming and spotted a beery-thirtysomething-lads-reliving-being-20 shaped hole in the market. Eventually both they and the beer queue become unbearably tedious and we bugger off to a nearby pub for a bit.
 

We return to the sounds of The Zutons, a band I've struggled to see the point of until now - they're a bloody great festival band. Lively and crowd-pleasing and dishing out tunes everyone can have a bit of a dance and a sing along to it's finally started to feel like a festival as opposed to a local radio roadshow, and gets the whole crowd warmed up nicely for the headliners.

After a few years in the post-third-album wilderness, 2009 has seen a stunning return to form for Doves. Not just in the sense that "Kingdom Of Rust" was a better album than most old fans had dared to hope for; live they've barely missed a beat on the four occasions I've seen them previously this year and this fifth is no exception. The opening "Jetstream" just sound massive, and as the sun starts to set and the spotlights kick in these three very ordinary looking Mancunians start to resemble the stadium band they always should have been. "Pounding" could wake the dead tonight; "Kingdom of Rust" bristles like Morricone producing Johnny Cash, whilst a storming "Black And White Town" reminds us that even "Some Cities" had its moments after all. And when they come back on and throw "The Cedar Room", "Here It Comes" and "There Goes The Fear" at us all the misery of endless queues and enduring bands you wouldn't throw a life raft to normally just melts away. They go off again. It's twenty past nine. The curfew is half past. Just like in Delamere Forest at the start of this beautiful summer, we can feel a "Space Face" coming on and we're right - the greatest stadium indie rave crossover anthem ever means we leave smiling.
 

In the pub near the station I find myself discussing the woeful lack of facilities with the bloke stood next to me at the bar, and he explains that in previous years the event's been more about chart pop, "Westlife and stuff", whose natural audience probably don't have the beer (and associated sanitation) requirements of today's crowd; "it's great they put some real bands on this year", he says. In that context, for the local crowd, I can see his point - but there's still no need for Ocean Colour Scene in 2009. It's Bingley though, it was never exactly going to be cutting edge. That said, a few hours and trains later it's Sunday and I'm in... Redbridge. Again, a place more generally found on the submissive end of a coupling (in this case football team Dagenham And) it's kind of near Romford. Which, it has to be said, does not immediately bring to mind the cutting edge of anything apart from maybe overly-modified hatchbacks with unnecessarily large bass bins. It does, however, have a decent bit of woodland - Hainault Forest - and it's not that far from London. Hence Offset Festival, with a line-up so achingly hip it probably gets its hair cut in Hoxton.
 

The other stages are all in litte tents arranged in a circle, which at least means you never have to try and remember where the one you want to visit next is as you can just carry on walking round until you find it. She Keeps Bees are playing in one of them; a garagey couple-duo reminiscent of The Kills before they went completely shit, they're from Brooklyn which is enough to guarantee a full house. Meanwhile in the Hardcore tent, one of Kong is wearing hotpants.
 

S.C.U.M. are a big draw on the main stage, having collected a respectable quantity of (tonight's headliners) The Horrors' fans whilst supporting them earlier this year. And yes, they are another young band with 80s stylings, but they do do it really well. Magazine-ish keyboards sweep across early New Order electro-post-punk beats, and they have a real star in the making in the form of singer Tom, erm, Scum. All cheekbones and floppy side parting and long coat and high-waisted trousers he over-emotes absolutely every line in a way that should be really annoying, stepping up onto the stagefront as smoke billows around him - which should by rights be really annoying, but by a combination of charm and great tunes just about manages to pull it off. Next up are Die Die Die, for whom I seem to have written in the notes I'm still vaguely keeping at this point, "yeah, Placebo, whatever". Time for a wander. I settle on what's generally my default setting for festival downtime - hanging around the back of the new bands tent in case there's anything happening I should know about. Unfortunately there's just some unremarkable bunch fronted by a shouty girl with a bowl cut who may or may not be Death Cigarettes but I can't really be bothered moving to find out. As soon as they disappear, however, the tent starts filling - Bo Ningen have already been recommended to me by a couple of people, and the noise emerging is that of a colossal pile of full-on freakout psychedelia.
 

Does anyone actually care that Ipso Facto (billed next in here) have split up? Nope? Moving swiftly on then.
 

Maps, next, and if I'm being honest this is what I've come for - a fix of the world's greatest electronic act conveniently round about half way between the end of July's tour and the start of October's. Mostly it's the same set as those summer gigs, although (possibly realising that a lot of people like to hear songs they know) "You Don't Know Her Name" AKA the festival anthem of summer 2007 has made a re-appearance somewhere in the middle of it. The album's released a week on Monday (28th) and OK, I'll admit, I have an advance copy (see next issue of Incendiary for my review, round about the same time I think) and the stuff they've been playing live - brilliant as it is - doesn't even touch the three best tracks on it. Yes, it really is that fucking good. There'll be a review in Incendiary next time Rich gets round to publishing (1st October, he claims.)
 

In front of the main stage there's a lively crowd of hip young things dancing, whilst behind them a smattering of faces old enough to be their parents. As indeed there is on the stage itself, where A Certain Ratio are happily showing all and sundry how many decade ahead of their time they were. (About two and a half. And yeah, maybe "happily" isn't really the word I was looking for in relation to the perenially dour-looking Jeremy Kerr).

 

Back in the new bands tent I'm delighted as I am astonished to see a small but enthusiastic crowd going mad for another Manchester band. In the four years since Stranger Son of WB And The Robot Crab Exodus Part Two first emerged from the rubble of various imploding local acts they've operated a revolving door of membership Mark E Smith would be proud of, (thankfully) dropped the extraneous words from their name, and mutated into a tight, pulsating history of Mancunian music 1979 to present day.
 

One last wander back round to the main stage, then, where The Horrors are meant to be on at 9.30 but by five to ten there's no sign of them. And considering Faris Badwan and co were standing next to us in this very spot during SCUM's set it's not like they were late getting here is it? The last of the people I'm here with is leaving; OK, it's cold, I'm in a forest four miles from Romford (wherever the hell that is) with no idea how I'm getting back to the Travelodge I've not actually checked in to yet, and should probably go with him but... 10pm. Drum checks. The phrase "for fuck's sake" springs to mind. It's about quarter past when they finally get underway and it's... underwhelming. The Horrors? Underwhelming? There's no doubt "Primary Colours" is about a million times better than "Strange House" and yet...

This band used to be so intense live. No songs to speak of but the first couple of times I saw them, 06 and early 07, they were nothing short of incendiary. Now they've got songs, but something's lost. Faris seems to be modelling his stagecraft on Ian McCulloch these days and I preferred him when he was the mutant hybrid of Ian Curtis and Tom (Forward Russia) Woodhead on speed. Or maybe it's the setting that doesn't suit - they've got big enough to headline festivals but don't really know quite how to play it yet on a big stage in front of as many "observers" as fans. Or maybe for those of us not high on the buzz of waiting for a band you love (and coming down from the triple high of Maps, ACR and SSOWB) they just kept us waiting too long in the dampening cold. I don't know. The keyboard sounds are glorious, the drums wonderfully Chameleons-esque, but there's a lot less of the feedback and distortion that drenched their sound even three months ago, and its absence rather shines a light on the fact that for all his charisma, Faris is not actually much of a singer. My mind is already drifting towards the taxi queue, and after another couple of songs I let my feet follow.
 

Romford Travelodge is nicer than Saltash and Carlisle but not as nice as Tunbridge Wells. From Doves in a forest back in June to Doves and a forest separately this weekend it's been one hell of a summer.

LINKS

http://www.myspace.com/lunaryouth
http://www.myspace.com/modernsoundlibrary
http://www.myspace.com/thelaureates
http://www.myspace.com/thedeclinerock
http://www.myspace.com/joroseandthehardhearts
http://www.myspace.com/theansweringmachine
http://www.myspace.com/listentoliamfrost
http://www.myspace.com/danielland
http://www.myspace.com/pablosfinesthour
http://www.myspace.com/cheapcuts
http://blogs.myspace.com/hayleyfaye
http://www.myspace.com/damonandnaomi
http://www.myspace.com/seadevilsounds
http://www.myspace.com/thesecondfloorband
http://www.myspace.com/detroitsocialclub
http://www.myspace.com/gofindthedykeenies
http://www.myspace.com/ocsmusic
http://www.myspace.com/thezutons
http://www.myspace.com/dovesmyspace
http://www.myspace.com/detachments
http://www.myspace.com/shekeepsbees
http://www.myspace.com/kongdom
http://www.myspace.com/scum1968
http://www.myspace.com/diediedienz
http://www.myspace.com/boningen
http://www.myspace.com/mapsmusic
http://www.myspace.com/acertainratio
http://www.myspace.com/strangersonofwb
http://www.myspace.com/wildbeasts
http://www.myspace.com/thehorrors

So I get back from Inverness and all I want to do is go to bed for about a week. Obviously the day job means I can't actually do this, but a few nights in are definitely in order. My back's done in, probably as a result of spending most of the weekend - and a good few of the previous ones - driving stints that'd probably contravene some EU limit if I did it for a living, and my bank balance is best described as "stable but critical". Luckily mid-August is also a thin time for gigs, what with holidays and festivals and stuff; this week it all starts to get going again, but first (as anyone still reading this every week will probably be relieved to hear) the last British Sea Power fixture of the summer - for me, anyway, as I can't afford a ticket to Green Man and I wouldn't go to V Festival if you paid me - and a weekend of catching up with a couple of my local regulars...

In Friday's case, however, the setting is anything but regular. In summer 2008, bored on a bank holiday weekend, I went to watch I Am Kloot on an outdoor stage in the "exciting" new Spinningfields quarter. A glittering waterside development between Manchester and Salford, its "boulevards" are lined with trees and green spaces, with wide pedestrianised walkways separating box-fresh towers of designery apartments and upper-tier chain bars (you know, Cafe Rouge, that Italian-flavoured one beginning with Z). Thing is, Manchester and Salford were hardly lacking in designery waterside apartment complexes even before the credit crunch made getting a mortgage a bit more of a challenge. I only need look out of my window over the abandoned foundations and silenced cranes on what used to be the Brazil Street car park to see the burst bubble in full effect; for the few still fortunate enough to be hunting for a yuppie-flat the northern fringe developments of "New Islington" have the advantage of actually being near some amenities. Spinningfields has the air of a very expensive ghost town; the cafe-bars are not exactly overspilling with the photogenic twentysomething professionals clinking wine glasses seen on the promotional materials.
If last year's Spinningfields Festival felt like an advertising presentation for the area (which it did) then this years smells more of desperation to get a few quid over the bars. A strategy which might have been more successful had the new branch of Kro around which the 2009 festival is based bothered to employ more than one and a half not especially speedy bar staff. That said, it wouldn't exactly be the first venue to underestimate the drinking capacity of the predominantly scruffy and working class and very much not property developers' target market Puressence crew on a weekend binge.

Or indeed the band, who are certainly "merry", at the very least. This is Puressence in acoustic mode, so it's basically the James Mudriczki And Lowell Killen Show, with bassist Kev doing the lights. Doing the lights, in this case, entailing shining various lurid spotlights at the notoriously bright-color-phobic Jimmy for as long as he can possibly get away with. This is longer than usual, as Jimmy is mostly entertaining himself by clanking along the barrier singing right into peoples' faces, fondling bald men's heads, stealing people's hats and starting people out - whhilst Lowell seems to need to retune his acoustic at least once per song. Oh, and there's the volume thing, too. Last year's I Am Kloot gig was effectively brought to a halt by someone in one of the apartments whingeing (you mean people do actually live here?); this year the orgamisers are playing it safe with a 9pm live music curfew and a PA that's so quiet that when Jimmy's stood about two metres down the barrier from where we are we can still hear his actual voice louder than the one coming out of the speakers. An associate of the band later describes the whole thing as "detrimental", and he could have a point, except... except...

How is it that this man, a man whose stage manner oscillates between "Bono messianic" and "aggressive beggar", even when he's ridiculously inebriated, can cause a lump in the throat the way he does? Every time. That he can do it covering a song by the king of 70s-80s schmaltz-ballads Mike Batt - Art Garfunkel hit "Bright Eyes" - is nothing short of remarkable. If ever there were someone you suspect of selling their soul to the devil for musical talent it's this cheeky looking lad. He does sometimes try and stick a few too many notes in a syllable, but he never misses one he aims for. And the tunes themselves - born at the intersection between Chameleons darkness and slightly laddish terrace anthems - work equally well in this stripped-down format. Every last one of them. Even if afterwards band and crew alike are left rather confused as to what's just happened. We're ushered out before it's even dark.

Saturday, it's an audience with a couple of bands who couldn't be more "on home territory" if they were playing in their own living room. This is The Witchwood on a Saturday night, and it's heaving. Sold out even. Most of the tickets went by word-of-mouth and outside people are trying to sort out who's got whose. Nobody's got an attitude, both bands have pulled a decent crowd and most people that came for one will end up watching the other too. This is grass roots independent promotion how it should be done.

And I'm struck by the fact that neither of these bands play a style of music I generally have much to do with - sometimes quality is enough.

And so to Sunday and that final fling of my British Sea Power summer season. And the final Travelodge: the mothership of the organisation, Kings Cross Royal Scot. The one most likely to be still available on a cheap one at short notice - because it's about the size of a small town. But London, I hear you ask, that's not exactly in keeping with British Sea Power's summer of off-the-beaten-track gigs and festivals, is it? Well, no - the venue's just a half hour walk from Kings Cross - but put any ideas of dark rooms in Camden or whatever right out of your mind. This evening we will be entertained in the extremely bizarre surroundings of Regents Park Open Air Theatre. Bizarre, because it does exactly what it says on the tin: it's a permanent stage with semicircular stalls seating and a foyer bar, but it's in the open air. It does not usually play host to rock bands and their fans. We, however, are of course a very civilised bunch and thus start the festivities with a picnic.

Yep - for the second time in three weekends. Only this time the soundtrack is provided not by a boom-box but by British Sea Power themselves soundchecking, and then after the doors have opened, Sparrow And The Workshop's support set. None of us could really be bothered going in for them - they've supported the band before, they're OK, but we've got sherry and cheese and olives, and both BSP drummer Woody and one of the regular fans have brought their babies along, and it really is like some sort of family gathering. A good few of us make it inside for the second support, though, because after their astonishing set at last October's Roundhouse gig we're looking forward to seeing them again and they don't exactly get outside of the capital much...

It's the London Bulgarian Choir! And no sooner have I snapped this wonderful image then a black-suited security person is tapping me on the shoulder. "No photos." Right, OK... this is a little strange; BSP themselves are quite accustomed to fans photographing their gigs, and in some cases enjoy looking at the results themselves, so I guess it's a venue thing. Miserable bastards. I grab one of the venue itself whilst his back's turned...

The choir are once again amazing, their haunting and eerie tones rather at odds with the sometimes rather bawdy subject matter - no, I haven't suddenly learnt Bulgarian; their leader explains each song, in the course of which we learn the wonderful new euphemism "planting the pepper", which means exactly what you think it does.

The stage is set - well, not exactly short of foliage round here - and I rapidly put my camera away after a second warning. And as with pretty much every gig in this astonishing summer season, British Sea Power are on fire. As befits the more sedate atmosphere, they go with the "Polite Version" opening salvo - as tried and tested at Port Eliot - of Hamilton's haunting "Smallest Church In Sussex" and the viola-led "Land Beyond", after which it feels a bit strange to be seated for "Lights Out" - and it's just not going to last. It's not so much a question of whether it's going to go off as when, and the opening chords to "Remember Me" are the not especially surprising catalyst. Legendary regular fan Scottish Bill, a man made entirely of white hair and red wine, is up and dancing. Two or three of us follow. Then some more. The security look nervous, but figure there's not much they can do so long as nobody's actually causing trouble - or indeed attempting to take a photo. A girl next to me reaches for her phone in a manner that quite obviously says she's felt an incoming text vibrate, and is pounced upon. Alfie and I look at each other, and at the handy little set of steps up to the side of the stage, and nothing needs to be said.

The band dish out a perfect set, with the back stairs of the stage often filled by the choir adding their voices ; this means a rare outing for the debut album opener "Men Together Today" as well as a brilliantly augmented "No Lucifer" during which the idea of a score of Bulgarians chanting an old wrestling refrain ("Easy! Easy!") doesn't sound half as bizarre as it does writing it down. They depart after a beautiful version of the shoegazey instrumental "Great Skua", but it's early and nobody's clearing anything away, and anyway, they usually pull out something pretty special for the encore at their showcase gigs.

Yep - welcome back Ursine Ultra, with bog roll. The choir are back for "All In It", and then Woody pounds that bass drum four to the floor and we know it's going to go crazy. Alfie and I have edged out to the side, we smile at twelve year old Archie, a veteran of pretty much every all-ages gig the band have played since the age of five; his dad nods back at us as if to say "You go first, we'll be right behind you". Band and bear are throwing branches into the crowd as fast as the bouncers can snatch them back, and when the fabled beast (containing, on this occasion, TV actor Matthew Horne) provides a distraction by almost lurching right off the centre of the stage...

That'll be us at 5 minutes 50. The speed with which we are literally thrown from the stage and wrestled to the floor rather puts Archie and his dad off following suit, but unlike Bill we manage to avoid ejection from the venue and rejoing the happy branch-waving hordes down the front. The bouncers just look really pissed off. I'm guessing they don't get that kind of thing at their Shakespeare plays. We all walk out of there grinning from ear to ear knowing the greatest live guitar band in the world have pulled it off again.

As I write this, about a week later, news has just filtered through that Snow Patrol will be headlining the Chelmsford V Festival after Liam Gallagher succumbed to laryngitis, and I'm remembering stories of a legendary Belfast gig in 2003 (I couldn't actually make it myself) where Snow Patrol's people pulled rank and insisted they headlined over BSP. Apparently the crowd went crazy for our lads then fucked off to the pub leaving the dull fuckers headlining to about 25 people. I genuinely never thought I'd say this but I wish I was in Chelmsford right now. As it is, I saw eight brilliant performances around every corner of the UK mainland over seven amazing weekends and even after all these years it still feels like a privilege. Real life is going to take some getting used to.

Tuesday. You know sometimes when you're watching a live performance and your jaw just involuntarily drops because you can't quite believe what you are hearing? And you turn round and the person standing next to you is looking equally amazed... and he's the promoter who actually booked the artist in the first place... He, in this case, is Air Cav bassist Mark Jones, allegedly such a regular fixture in Centro that they eventually let him book live music for them. The session goes by the name of Revue and happens every second Tuesday; it's free to get in and you get three up-and-coming live acts from Manchester and beyond. And the artist who's got us transfixed is a young man from Huddersfield by the name of Charlie Barnes.

Thursday it's a trip across the river to Islington Mill, and it turns out to be a trip in more ways than one....

At this point I must express gratitude to Simon from DILE for driving us home, as I'm still picking up bits of my brain and trying to work out where they came from. And I repeat, no drugs (relatively weak pear cider notwithstanding) were involved in this experience.

Friday and it's the After Work Express again. I'm getting to the point where I know every last landmark on this journey; Vrigin's mushroom and cheese toasties are becoming party of my staple diet, and I don't even have to look things up on Tube maps any more. Who is it this time then? Well, it's a surprise trip to see an old friend and - no, it never gets any easier - there's that nervous thought "yeah, but what if it's not actually any good", especially as I've promised (once they've got over the shock of my unexpected appearance) a "proper" review. One day I will stop setting this trap for myself. Luckily, it is good. It's more than good. And more than a little bit strange...

That 10pm train back to Manchester seems to take several billion years, but I reckon it was worth it.

Monday and  - bloody hell, I've not been in Ruby Lounge for weeks! OK, time for that other least favourite reviewing experience: the "pulling a press pass for a gig by a band you're somewhat less than familiar with because a band you like are supporting them and the tickets are really bloody expensive" one. Very occasionally this can prove enlightening, such as when Brakes supported Belle & Sebastian and I belatedly realised the latter had a little more bite and indeed musical talent than I'd always presumed.

Possibly my least successful review ever. Sorry everyone. Next week we visit the hitherto uncharted territory of Bingley for Doves' most low-key festival appearance of the year and, er, god knows what else. I'm so busy trying to plan October I haven't even thought about next week... a pretty good summer though, all in all - bring on the autumn!

http://www.myspace.com/puressence
http://www.myspace.com/dileband
http://www.myspace.com/uzualsuspectz
http://www.myspace.com/britishseapower
http://www.myspace.com/mountfabric
http://www.myspace.com/derdiedasuk
http://www.myspace.com/charliebarnes
http://www.myspace.com/revuemusic
http://www.myspace.com/woodenshjips
http://www.myspace.com/gnodgnod
http://www.myspace.com/wotgodforgot
http://www.myspace.com/petsinheaven
http://www.myspace.com/redghostsounds
http://www.myspace.com/soulsavers
http://www.myspace.com/exitcalm

Thursday 30th July, Hoxton. The very word conjures up images: of braying cokehead scenesters, of skinny rich kids slumming it dressed like the Shockwaves ads in the NME, of a world where cool is everything and depth is nothing - and this is coming not just from my Northern perspective but from friends in other parts of London too. In the few bleary-eyed days since last weekend and the end of my last blog piece I've almost put myself off going, but this is the last night of the Maps tour, they've been (as you can follow over the last three or four entries here) getting better every time, and I wouldn't be anywhere else for the world. I step off the tube into chaos; I've no idea what's going down but there are police vans up every side-street, a couple of roads closed off, a general air of tension, to the point where walking into the Bar And Kitchen (or the bar, anyway - stupid name for a place) actually comes as something of a relief. The braying scenester / slumming rich kid count is actually pretty low, and through the rather chromey bar (yeah, my Northern money doesn't go too far in here but then it doesn't anywhere in this city) and through a strangely blacked-out entrance which has "health hazard" written all over it is, surprisingly, a proper little hidden gem of a venue... who knew?

Not in Kansas Anymore clearly did, they being the clubnight responsible for this evening; this is the first time I've been to one of their nights. Just two live acts and a couple of DJ sets, the first live set is from Gold Panda (above), a man in a really quite horrible pink hoodie whose music exists somewhere between the more dubstep-flavoured end of Worried About Satan and the "new geeky techno" likes of Rival Consoles. His speciality is sonic manipulation; stretching and twisting familiar sounds such as sampled bits of vocal or instrument into something quite alien and disturbing. Great stuff - and if the electronica bubble bursts before he's made his fortune there's a potential bright future in sound effects...

If you read this stuff regularly, or have been doing recently, you probably have no more need to read anything about Maps again, ever. But as someone seeing them for the seventh time this month, I'm not really expecting them to go one higher than the recent Liverpool and Sheffield gigs. Somehow they do. The sound is brilliant, and from the first heavy hip-hop-flavoured beats of the beautifully mutated "It Will Find You" onward this is their best gig yet. If I could pick one moment from music this year that above all other sends a headrush of euphoria through my veins, it's the moment when "Back And Forth" explodes into "Let Go Of The Fear"; I'm trying not to think about the fact that this is the last gig for a few weeks now and savouring every last second of it.

I don't know how well the album will do, I'm not sure what the general music fan public and critics' concept of Maps might be, whether they've forgotten that Mercury nominated blast of 2007 (I mean who else was on the list that year; New Young Pony Club? Fionn Regan? Can't say as I've given these people a great deal of thought myself since then; even the winning Klaxons have all but disappeared from view) and what they'll make of this "new direction" which has never sounded anything other than a natural progression to me. All I know is that right now there's not another band on this earth I would rather be watching live (and yeah, that does include ones I may have seen a few more times) and the album of the year slot is pretty much a given now. And Hoxton? No more scenestery than anywhere else I've been, including some parts of Manchester's own Northern Quarter.

Friday morning the sun's finally come out again. Yesterday, bored on the train, surfing Facebook on my phone I noticed a post from one of my friends (an avid Twitterer) to another: Reverend And The Makers will be playing one of their customary "guerrilla gigs" at Speaker's Corner, Hyde Park, at 1pm. It's midday by the time I've finished my breakfast and in no real hurry to get home, so I decide to go and have a look and see what the fuss is all about. There are a couple of people with really big cameras, a punkish looking bloke and a group of student-age lads sitting around; amongst the tourists we sort of catch each others' eyes like secret agents. My "mole" (the Twitterer) texts me it's gonna be half past now. The punkish looking bloke finally comes over, "are you..." "yeah, half past now..." "yeah that's what I've heard..." - and I overhear the student-age lads chatting; seems at least one of them's on work experience at the NME this week and this is his big story.

It's actually some time after that when the wandering minstrels appear in the distance; The Rev and a crew walking up the road strumming guitars. Seems the police have said they can't busk here without a licence so it's not going to happen. Sorry. We all stand around going "oh"; I find myself chatting to McClure about the landlord of The Hope And Anchor in Camden, with whom we both had startlingly similar run-ins on consecutive nights a few weeks ago (see my blog for 7th July) but all the time I'm thinking well what sort of revolutionary lets some copper tell him what to do? and it seems everyone else is thinking likewise, because soon the instruments have been unloaded. This isn't just going to be him strumming a few chords after all - what we get is a six or seven song acoustic full band gig - albeit a slightly scrappy one.

The tunes are actually better than I'd thought. Radio hit "Heavyweight Champion Of The World" and the excellent "Silence Is Talking" are amongst them, with a few guitars, a trumpet, melodica and accordian all getting a run-out; there's a spot of John Cooper Clarke style quickfire poetry between. The real surprise, however, is "He Said He Loved Me" - yeah, that annoying bit of sub Ting Tings music featuring sub Arctic Monkeys "social commentary" that was the band's second single - here it's rendered in an almost gypsy-folk style with the accordian taking the lead and the female vocal sung rather than shouted. And to be honest seeing the band like this was a lot more enjoyable than listening to their records; they showed impressive skill in playing acoustically (as in properly acoustically, not the sort of miked-up semi-acoustic "stripped down" sets many bands play as "acoustic" gigs these days - long referred to as "Acoustic My Arse" gigs by some of my friends folloing the Chameleons' tour of such back in 2001) and McClure's lyrics - his strongest point - were much more the focus. Still unlikely to ever consider myself a fan of the band; I'm unlikely to ever go and see them at a "normal" gig, but I came away with a lot of respect for the guy.

It is less than two hours later in my regular Kings Cross internet place that I see myself - or at least my hair - on Youtube. Fuck, you can't do anything without getting on the bloody internet these days can you?

http://www.nme.com/news/Reverend-and-the-makers/46429

Arriving back at Euston, I find myself with somewhat less respect for Virgin Trains.I was vaguely aware that trains out of London are subject to an afternoon restriction on "off peak" tickets but was unaware it started as early as 3pm. I have just missed the last train my ticket will let me on - until 6.40pm. This is really not good; I'm tired and skint and on a post-tour comedown and just want to go home. Make mental note of this for future and thank heavens I am not rushng back for anything crucial, whilst muttering to myself that the sooner they renationalise the railways and make them a public service rather than a fat cat scam the better. I also hope Virgin never introduce this policy in the opposite direction, or after-work jaunts to brilliant gigs like last night's would be off limits. Although I do make it back in time for Friday's home fixture - largely because Friday's home fixture (well, Chorlton Irish Club) is a Blowout gig.

Time was pretty much every Friday night was a Blowout gig; the default setting wander over to the Bierkeller (RIP) for whatever they happened to have on there; now re-established back in its original home, the one thing that can usually be said with some certainty about Blowout is that any published timings are in Blowout Time, which bears only the faintest resemblance to that in the outside world. The first band I want to see (and whose manager I've promised a review) are scheduled at 8.45pm. My train arrives in Piccadilly at 8.49pm. It's maybe 15 minutes to Chorlton by taxi (plus another five to get my mates out of the pub). Should make that easily then. We do.

I spend Saturday largely lying around the house unable to move. Decide against going out, as there's another 250 mile drive Sunday morning. July may be over in the technical sense, but the last weekend in this month of wonderful madness isn't over yet: I am thoroughly sick of the sight of the M6 and the roadworks on the M25; off at junction 5 we pass a sign for Paddock Wood, and I think how Hop Farm seems a lot more than just four weeks ago. Fitting really that the rollercoaster that was July 2009 is reaching its destination just a couple of miles from where it started: Tunbridge Wells. It looks a bit posh. I mean really - this is the Travelodge?

Four and a half years ago, British Sea Power played a new legendary gig at High Rocks, a beautiful barn-conversion inn a couple of leafy miles out of town. A year or so before I started this thing, but I wrote about it here: http://www.music-dash.co.uk/live/archivelive.asp?item=600 . It was a strange feeling when they announced they'd be returning in 2009 - you can't repeat a one-off, can you? But there's been a lot of water under a lot of bridges since then...

This was February 2005. Eamon (centre) left a year or so later and formed Brakes; their third album's been on our stereo on the way down. The following night's gig at Grasmere Village Hall saw a viola player guest on a couple of tracks - these days the idea of Abi Fry not being in the band would seem a bit odd. And if there were ever a time to go back, it would be now - with the band on such a rich seam of great live form that fans are coming away from one weekend's gig and rearranging their lives to get to the next. This time of course it's not February and it's not cold or dark, and that creepy wooded track is a beautiful English country lane of the sort we urbanites sometimes forget even exists any more, with every shade of green picked out in the warm afternoon sun. The authentically preserved steam train that runs from the town down to the Inn rattles past, and on it is Geordie Mark, one of our regulars. I'll let him take up the story for a minute:

Let me explain. Hardcore BSP regulars Mark (another one) and Yaz - well over 300 gigs between them - are celebrating their 22nd wedding anniversary. On a traffic island. Two plastic decoy birds are perched on the roadsign; there are trestle tables with a selection of fine sherries, a cheeseboard, plates of Yaz's home-made samosas (which are better than any I've eaten in any restaurant or takeaway) and an I-pod docked into a speaker blasting out old-school classics such as The Skids' "Into The Valley" and SLF's "Alternative Ulster". There, that makes a lot more sense, doesn't it? It does to us. Geordie Mark appears soon afterwards along with a young man who looks a lot less confused than he'd have the right to be, who turns out to be the bassist with support band Arrows Of Love, and by the time we get back to the venue in time for their set they're guaranteed a good reception because we are, for the most part, completely leathered...

I wish I could remember more about them actually. The singer, it turns out, used to front arty folksters Hush The Many and there's a bit of what they were doing still audible here, although they've bolstered the sound with additional musicians and a bit of a post-punk guitar edge into something, well, bigger. On the radar, anyway.

British Sea Power have sound problems, technical problems, you name it - but still manage to put in a top level performance. There's one new song in the set, with a working title of "7/4" which is the time signature for bits of it - erk, they really have gone prog/post-rock haven't they!? Well no, it's more of a post-punk-ish kind of thing. The other bit everyone is talking about for days afterwards is one of those things that, well, this is how online mag http://www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk reported it and I think I'll let them tell the tale from the outside, so to speak...

You're not the only one, mate.

Well done Mark. You will never be allowed to forget this... The band recover to finish their set, and a lively moshpit develops whose average age is considerably older than me. The ending is suitably chaotic, and Scott defies all common sense and health and safety concerns by taking a liking to one of the beams...

It has the feel of one of those raucously insane gigs from the early days, only with a set drawing the best from across their career - what more could you ask for for your Sherry And Samosas Wedding Anniversary? Or indeed for any Sunday afternoon. Even if it does, for me, mean yet another day of homeward comedown motorway boredom; I'm starting to forget what my own home actually looks like.

Still, it's a few days before my body or bank balance will let me out of the house again, for the regular (ish) Thursday meeting of Team MM which convenes at whatever gig we're going to. Not much going on tonight so we convene at the pot-luck brantub that is unsigned night at the Roadhouse. And  - erk! - it's all a bit loud and young-people-ish...

Blacktop play the sort of complicated alt-metal-with-a-splash-of-emo that I really do not understand in any way, although I can't fault their energy, especially the fuchsia-haired bassist (although his half-mast turn-ups bother me). Clearly at a fairly early stage of development they're impressing us until they do that thing young new bands sometimes do and really shouldn't - the influence cover. This is not the same as bands who throw in their own rework of someone else's song - I remember a decent young punk band who used to do a belting "Bad Moon Rising" - this is where it's so obviously one of the songs they learnt from and should be never be heard outside of the practice room: Blacktop's is "Plug In Baby" (I mean if you must cover a band like Muse it's not a good idea to go for one of their best known songs) and it's a bit cringeworthy. An opinion which the other half of Team MM actually imparts to them. A bit like "say no to pay-to-play" it's almost like a sort of mentoring duty...

Metonia are a bit more established; the next step up the unsigned ladder. Loads of gigs in Manchester, their Burnley hometown and across the north west; they're pretty accomplished and tight and have a clutch of catchy, pacy tunes - all of which sound almost exactly like The Manic Street Preachers. Granted, it's not the much-copied early-day Manics but the more mature, mainstream-with-bite sound which is the basis for Metonia, but it's hard to hear anything else in there. They do it very well. Like Crocodiles' Mary Chain impressions last week. Problem is the Manics are very much still going in (unlike the Mary Chain) much the same form that's being plundered here; where Crocodiles' homages were almost like peering into a time-capsule, Metonia's are a bit like when they started running that I Heart The 90s programme before the 90s were even over. On the other hand, the charts and festivals are packed full of bands influenced by their only slightly preceding contemporaries - White Lies doing Editors doing Interpol for instance - so why the hell not?

Friday, weekend, and what does weekend mean? Yep, more British Sea Power gigs, at least it does this summer. I've written in the past about the rather wonderful things being done by the Lancaster-based promoters Get It Loud In Libraries - the things in question being, basically, booking bands to play in their library. Not low-key acoustic sets perched tastefully in the comfy chair corner; no, full-on proper amplified gigs.After a couple of years' successful and frequently sold-out sessions, they've started to move up a bit in terms of the level of bands they're able to book. Normally when a promoter starts to move up a bit the answer is a bigger venue. For GILIL the answer is... a bigger library. And luckily for them, nearby Morecambe has just the thing.

A friend of and frequent support for British Sea Power, Rose Elinor Dougall still doesn't quite seem sure exactly where she wants to be. Like her fellow founding Pipettes she's left the trash-pop a long way behind (a wise choice; last time I looked they were still limping along without a single original member) and sometimes it's just her and her keyboard, sometimes she's fronting a full band with a classic indie guitar-pop sound, today it's her and one guitarist. They make a great sound; her very English, well-spoken but melancholy vocals are reminiscent of such illustrious forebears as Sarahs Nixey (Black Box Recorder), Cracknell (St Etienne) and Blackwood (Dubstar), whilst her vintage organ sound could have wandered in off some 60s Joe Meek nugget. The songs, however, just don't seem to have the hooks they should. Is it all new material since our last encounter, or is it just rather unmemorable? It's actually kind of frustrating, given that everything else is very much in place.

British Sea Power live have almost certainly never been described as unmemorable, and the nature of tonight's gig - an all-ages (as in ALL ages, not the 14+ that's come to mean) event in a town that doesn't see too many big names outside of the annual punk festival - means this is especially true here. Early on someone attempts to start a moshpit during "Remember Me" but it doesn't really take off - it's kind of hard to let go with wilful abandon when you're in a place more normally associated with being very quiet and there isn't quite the critical mass of hyped-up kids that turned The Whip's 2007 Lancaster library gig into the strangest rave ever. The sound's a bit dodgy too at first, although luckily it's picked up in time for tonight's one unreleased song which goes by the slightly strange name of "Pyrex". No idea what it's on about, but it's a good one. And by the end of the encore...

...the stage is full of audience menbers wearing Ordnance Survey maps which Noble has helpfully liberated. So if you live in Morecambe and fancy a nice walk in the Peak District, I'd leave it a couple of weeks.

It's quite an early finish, which is useful; we're heading straight off afterwards - as, indeed, are the band - to Carlisle Travelodge. (This, in contrast to Tunbridge Wells, is a right shit-hole of a Travelodge. They are very much not all the same; at the top you get the ones like that which were converted from somewhere posher; in the middle those such as Saltash or Nottingham Riverside purpose-built at main road junctions or edge-of-town business/retail parks; and at the bottom these grim city centre ones which are always a bit too dark: see also Nottingham Central or Dundee. I'm not sure if it's good or not that I even know this much about Travelodges). Because Saturday they're returning to Belladrum Tartan Heart, a festival whose very remoteness leaves it relatively chilled affair.

It's situated about ten miles out of Inverness, between the Beauly Firth and Loch Ness itself. It's a good hundred miles south of the mainland's extremities, but unless any touring bands ever play in Thurso and Wick (do they? does anyone know?) it's about as far north as a UK awayday can be. And at one point it very much feels like we may not make it: many hours from Carlisle and just fourteen miles outside Inverness, the A9 - Scotland's one main road from Perth upwards - is blocked. Massive accident, apparently. Another hour of B-roads though and we're there. One of our crew who made it through the A9 just before the accident texts us that the festival has lost some of its charm - it's four years since we and British Sea Power were last here, and maybe we're looking at it with a little bit of rose-tinted nostalgia; there certainly seem to be more people around, but then four years ago it pissed it down solidly throughout the weekend. Today it's bright sunshine. Although all the bands we want to see are playing in a tent anyway...

The first of these being The Phantom Band. The recommendation of various friends and a mind-melting performance at the Deaf Institute in March were followed by my initial disappointment with their debut album - maybe not disappointment, but certainly a bit of a shrug. It's a grower - its mutant hybrid of offbeat indie, Krautrock and Scottish folk seeing more stereo time as the year goes on. But it still comes nowhere near doing justice to their live performance. This is, they tell us, the third most northerly place they've ever played (I wonder if Thurso or Wick was one of the others?) before launching into something that sounds like Damo Suzuki doing the Bunnymen's "Rescue" (I mostly listen to the album whilst driving so I have no idea what most of the titles are), but it's the chilling, atmospheric "Island" that really gets the hairs on the back of the neck. that they can go from that to twatting about with woodblocks and melodicas and getting everyone dancing in the space of about three minutes is a fine illustration of why they are often compared to our beloved BSP - in the modern world of indie band saturation, having genuine depths and different angles to play with is a worthwhile skill. It's a great set.

They are, rather shamefully, the only Scottish band we actually manage to see today. That said, a scan of the listings reveal a far broader geographical spread of performers on the music stages than in 2005, whereby BSP and Brakes were pretty much the English contingent and that big Saturday night headline slot went to the Proclaimers - and I'll stand by the fact that they were great fun that night. So after a run to sample various Scottish delicacies from the many and completely non-corporate food stalls (amongst the mostly meat-based offerings we discover a macaroni cheese stall and I can safely say it's the best macaroni cheese I've ever tasted) we reconvene to catch an American band who were actually initially recommended to me some years back by the same person who put me onto The Phantom Band (cheers Den!) - Devotchka.

I've seen them maybe three times since then and loved their unique mixture of highbrow musicianship, gypsy folk and Arcade Fire dramatics, and I've dragged the whole crew along... and typically, they're really rather limp tonight. The sound mix (which was fine for the Phantom Band and will later be fine for BSP, so the PA and festival soundcrew can't be blamed) is weak, and they basically sound like a folk band as opposed to the colossus they can be; by the time they get to the raucous cuts from "How It Ends" at the end of the set it's too little and too late.

More wandering around reveals two reasons why Belladrum is still much better than most festivals (aside from the stunning location)...

Firstly, where other festivals have a dance tent, Belladrum has a rave castle. At this point in time they're playing some blistering techno, too, although it will have sadly reverted to fairly bogstandard disco/house by later on.

Secondly, there is adequate provision for necessities. There is also a bagpipe folk band covering Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" and The Scissor Sisters' "Take Your Mama Out", although they're so popular I can't actually get close enough to photograph them - you're never that far from a bagpipe or two here, anyway.

In 2005 British Sea Power had a main stage early evening slot; in 2009 they're headlining the second stage, and our little away crew's by this point rather well-oiled and have befriended pretty much everyone around us, including two blokes in Dukla Prague away shirts, which is always a useful bonding mechanism for Half Man Half Biscuit fans - they don't even know each other. The band, meanwhile, know you only have one shot at your festival opener and it may be the difference between some neutrals staying or wandering off to see what's on elsewhere: it's a storming "Lights Out For Darker Skies" and the crowd is theirs to keep. No new stuff, no rare stuff, most of the singles; this is BSP in festival conquering mode and conquer they very much do. There's even room for "Blackout" which is always a highlight, and they end on an absolutely raucous "Carrion" and "Rock". We suspect some of the band might have had a few drinks themselves by this point.

We, meanwhile, end up spending our remaining beer tokens on something called Morgan's Spiced, and just about make it back to the tent before passing out.

Sunday morning is as misty and sunny as a highly stylised whisky advert. We have a very long drive home ahead of us, but first there's somewhere I have to go. We saw the signs for it four years ago, but with the heavy rain, a couple of passengers, a hire car and a plane to catch in Edinburgh it wasn't practical. This time, however... we turn the other way out of Belladrum and down a steep incline; through the village on the bank of the Loch with its cafes and guest houses and Nessie memorabilia shops. Even at half past nine in the morning the car park contains a reasonable number of Japanese tourists training binoculars on the still water in the hope of a green head appearing; there's a wall that says "Do Not Stand On This Wall" but of course we do, and there it is in front of me. It almost takes my breath away.

This has been another weekend in a summer - and a life - defined by the music I love, for which I make no apologies. I came to the Highlands because of British Sea Power, a band who effectively extended my youth by six years and counting by the simple coincidence of releasing an amazing single called "Carrion" and a still incredible debut album just a few weeks after The Chameleons split for the final time, when I was desperate to continue the awaydaying habits we'd acquired, but I just never expected to hear another band that'd be worth it. In those six years I have discovered so many great bands I barely have time to see them all as much as I'd like, but it's quite possible that without The Chameleons none of this would have happened. Here, over quarter of a century ago a bunch of young lads from Middleton found inspiration for the album they were writing, and I finally see for the first time with my own eyes a shape that has been familiar to me for most of this life, the inspiration for my inspiration, and the path through music which has led me back here blows my mind for a bit...

The journey home is not an easy one - almost 400 miles, and whilst the A9 boasts beautiful views along most of its length I could really do without spending two hours staring at the back of various caravans, as the eventual overtaking of one on the road's occasional snatches of dual carriagaway is swiftly followed by the catching of another as soon as the road's back to a single track. Even crossing the border into England is a sign we still have a long way to go - if you're English and have never been to Carlisle I can promise you it is further than you think. (Members of The Lucid Dream may ignore that last sentence - but believe me lads there's a reason why I've never been to see you on home turf yet and it's not cos you don't deserve it - one day though...) Right now I never want to see a motorway or roadworks sign again as long as I live. Six consecutive weekends of long-haul watching the greatest guitar band in the world on storming form in the very corners of this island; Kent, Eastleigh, Cheltenham, Cornwall, Kent again and now the Highlands, with seven incredible dates watching the greatest electronic band in the world in slightly more conventional cities in between, and a few great local gigs squeezed down the sides. You can keep your two weeks in sunny foreign climes, this has been one hell of a summer.

http://www.myspace.com/goldpanda
http://www.myspace.com/mapsmusic
http://www.myspace.com/notinkansasanymoreclub
http://www.myspace.com/reverendmusic
http://www.myspace.com/janicegrahamband
http://www.myspace.com/dirtynorthband
http://www.myspace.com/easterx
http://www.myspace.com/theluciddream08
http://www.myspace.com/joroseandthehardhearts
http://www.myspace.com/crocodilescrocodilescrocodiles
http://www.myspace.com/arrowsoflove
http://www.myspace.com/britishseapower
http://www.myspace.com/blacktopuk
http://www.myspace.com/metonia
http://www.myspace.com/getitloudinlibraries
http://www.myspace.com/roseelinordougallmusic
http://www.myspace.com/thephantombandpage
http://www.myspace.com/devotchkamusic

Wednesday. For a lot of people, going to a gig involves presenting your Seeticket to the uniformed doorman of the Corporate Academy and enjoying a popular beat combo reproducing tracks from their CDs, maybe even "a new one" (you can always go to the bar at this point). Tiger Lounge is, basically, the antithesis of all that, with a selection of nights ranging from the grassroots raw to the complete headfuck, and tonight - well, there's a figure sort of lurching round the stage with a sack on his head. He does not actually appear to be in electropop-indie crackpots The Thinman Project, who are playing on said stage, he's more some kind of... prop. Who does appear to bear a slight resemblance to Politburo's Nick Alexander.

This is A Cabinet Of Curiosity, the brainchild of "much celebrated academic, TV presenter and philanthropist Leonard Skully PhD", and the great man appears between sets speaking from a projection screen in a voice oddly identical to that of Thinman (and Plague Doctor) John Hodgson. Hmmm. It is, of course, all in the grand tradition of deranged Mancunian underground cabaret - a line running from Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias in the 1970s through the more recent likes of Lord Mongo and Robin Nature-Bold, or Aidan Smith and Thingumabob And The Thingumajigs' 2008 rock opera - most of these names will mean nothing to anyone outside the ring road, but this is the Performing Arts you didn't get at Manchester International Festival. Conceived in this very basement following a discussion between Hodgson, Alexander and indeed your correspondent concluding that indie rock had got really boring because nobody put on a show any more, pretty much anything could happen.

'As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame'. - Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918. A literary reference in your band name? This could go either way. Kingfishers Catch Fire are not your average indie band (not that I'd expect one from, er,  Leonard Skully). Frontman Max Howard is certainly theatrical, boasting such a heavily enunciating voice that makes me think of Marc Almond auditioning for the RSC, and a tendency to fling his arms about like he's leading the torchsong at the end of some West End musical. This idea might have popped into my head because of his uncanny resenblance to "Any Dream Will Do" winner Lee Mead, and no, don't worry, I only know this because one of my friends harbours a bizarre obsession with said curly fop. Fittingly, they have songs called things like "Demons And Monsters" and "Apocalypse Song", which are every bit as over the top as they should be. I can't help thinking this band should be massive.

Next up is (or indeed are) Glyn Bailey And The Many Splendid Things, and I love the way the bassist is standing reading The Financial Times while the rest of them do a quick line check. Now I first encountered Mr Bailey playing at a David Lynch tribute night, which does seem oddly appropriate. I vaguely remember reading a biography that claimed he (Bailey, not Lynch) once worked as an egg delivery man, for instance. At least I hope I didn't imagine that. Bailey is from Blackpool, I believe, and with his rugged middle-aged good looks and smart attire could easily be belting out standards for easy cash in any of the resort's terrifying hotels, but chooses instead to play originals informed by David Bowie and The Divine Comedy in basements like this. Although I have no idea exactly what's going on tonight as I've seen him live a few times and I don't recognise any of the songs here. Not only that, but there seems to be a theme threading them together, narrated by the shadow of a humanoid with a bird's beak projected on a screen behind the band. The voice of this peculiar creature is not dissiliar to that of... Nick Alexander. They've had some fun putting this one together. And as if that's not enough, in between songs Bailey approached each member of his band with a battered leather packing case, from which they are each inviited to take a trinket. The drummer chooses a plastic Oscar. Only at the end does Bailey reveal that he once sold his soul to the dark side in return for his musical talent, and that by accepting these gifts the musicians have traded theirs in too. And then he brings the case around the crowd, giving us each a fortune cookie....

Um. Maybe later.

The evening is rounded off with a set of typically excellent and wigged-out Krautrock from The Sandells, but I think my brain has already melted.

Thursday. There's something beautifully incongruous about sitting in a comfy armchair watching Blood Moon.

Friday. The words "avoid unnecessary travel" have been appearing again this week as the country suddenly starts taking swine flu seriously. Every summer there's something. In 2007 it was the flooding - remember that? That was the advice from the AA and RAC on the afternoon of 25th July 2007, as the BBC flashed up pictures of people wading down streets and sandbagging their front doors. "Define unnecessary" I thought, as I raced down a clear M6 to a church in Northampton, where Maps were playing a gig I just knew I had to be at; a few hours later with every synapse in my brain rewired and every colour in the world looking brighter I knew something had changed. Four years earlier I'd misjudged my definition of unnecessary - the night in July 2003 that British Sea Power played one of their definitive gigs at the St John Boste Social Club in Kendal I was exhausted and jetlagged from an overseas trip and leaving work that night turned left for home instead of right for the motorway, a decision I started to regret as soon as I read the reports. In July 2007 I headed straight for Myspace, checked forthcoming dates, and started planning my summer festival schedule around Northampton's finest. In 2003 I'd never heard of Myspace and nor had most bands, but the BSP website listed a September tour of Germany and I found myself booking flights. These were the moments when I knew I wasn't going to miss another gig that was in any way feasible to get to. This is why on 25th July 2009 I consider a three hundred mile epic drive from Sheffield to Cornwall to be necessary...

When the date "Sheffield Tramlines Festival" appeared on Maps' Myspace page (and a couple of other bands I didn't actually get to see in the end) I asked people with Sheffield connections what it was all about. Nobody knew. It gradually became apparent it was one of these multi-venue urban festival things with sessions in pubs and venues across the city as well as a big outdoor stage somewhere - so far, so Dot to Dot / Live At Leeds / etc - but this one was free to get in. Who exactly is footing the bill never became clear, but if it is indeed the council then could Manchester and/or Salford please take note - or at least just bring back D:Percussion, you tight bastards.

Stupidest band name of the week award goes to Munch Munch (above). As far as I can remember (I'm writing this three days later but it was a long three days) they did kind of screwed up speed-electropop that's quite good, although the drum sound is horrible. We are quite glad Maps do not have a live drummer these days.

...and thus their run of storming form (with the exception of Technical Fuck Up Night in Manchester) continues. Wasn't sure about the choice of "I Dream Of Crystal" as the next (and album-trailing) single at first but this is, what, the sixth time I've heard it now and I'm coming to the conclusion that actually ANY of the new songs in this set - or indeed the others being previewed on Myspace (changing every week or two) - would cut the mustard, and after "Let Go Of The Fear" it is probably a good idea to run with a more song-based one. Which doesn't detract from the fact that "Let Go Of The Fear" is single of the year so far by a country mile, and tonight it's the best I've heard it yet - a brilliant sound mix that gives August's squelchy acid techno noises prominence and a great vocal from James, who also amuses us by making completely incomprehensible attempts at addressing the crowd between songs. At one point he mumbles "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing" before launching into a blistering "Love Will Come" and I'm thinking well if this is not knowing what the fuck you are doing then more bands should probably try it...

Headliners Errors must by now (after a run of supports over the past couple of years with British Sea Power, Forward Russia, 65daysofstatic and more) have taken pole position in my chart of bands I have seen the most times without ever actually making the effort to, but even I draw the line at that level of record-keeping. Technically I do not actually see them tonight at all, as a trip to the bar reveals that the pub is now rammed from end to end and there's no way I'm getting back to the front. Instead Alex and I simply delight in the fact that a band who basically sound like all the slightly dour electro we grew up on - New Order, Cabaret Voltaire, Section 25, even early Human League (in Alex's case anyway, I'm not that fucking old) - seem to be getting quite popular with people who weren't even born in the 80s.

The only slightly sad thing is that it's taken people from Northampton and Glasgow (although I believe Munch Munch are local ish) to bring the euphoria of live electronica to Sheffield in 2009, the Steel City that effectively pioneered the UK's first electro wave - at least alongside Manchester. Outside, later, someone comments that "Sheffield felt like Manchester tonight" and I kind of know what they mean. It strikes me that I am here in a new venue, in a part of a city I don't know too well, heading back to an identikit Ibis hotel, and as such I could be pretty much anywhere - such is the life of the awaydayer, and tomorrow is going to be one long, long day.

Saturday I leave around 9.30am; the M1 (accompanied by Fuck Buttons' "Street Horrrsing") is free flowing if rather hampered by roadworks and 50 limits. My vehement hatred of the M42 is not abated (Ulrich Schnauss "Far Away Trains" helps); the M5 is easy until just outside Bristol when I hit the mother and father and extended family of all traffic jams. I'm ahead of schedule though (and zoning out to Stephan Bodzin's "Liebe Ist") and manage to pick up my three passengers pretty much on time. The next 90 minutes we move about 15 miles (eased slightly by the hit-after-hit of The Jesus And Mary Chain's "21 Singles") having all forgotten, not being the breeding sort, that it's the first weekend of the school holidays and thus a pretty stupid time to do a last-minute trip to the South West. I consider my chances of making the festival in time for Neil Halstead's 5.30pm slot somewhat diminished. We're slightly worried it's going to be like this all the way to Cornwall, but British Sea Power aren't on til midnight - and then everyone seems to be going to Exmoor. The last 50 miles are a breeze, accompanied by the Sonic Cathedral compilation; as we cross the beautiful Tamar suspension bridge from Plymouth to Saltash with its astonishing views opening up on both sides of us the M83 mix of Maps' "To The Sky" hits its peak and I turn the stereo up as high as it will go. I do love a sublime bridge / music interface moment - there was BSP's "Heavenly Waters" over the Solway Firth on some northern jaunt once, or Galaxie 500's "Blue Thunder" crossing from Bristol to Wales - and none of these were actually planned in advance; that it's happened again feels like a good sign. These are the moments that define awaydays. We're in and out of the Travelodge in no time (at least before anyone notices there are four of us headed for a three person room) and roll up in St Germans at 5pm...

This is no ordinary festival. This, my friends, is Port Eliot Festival, a literary affair where poetry and readings are more the order of the day than amplified popular music; the majority of the audience look like teachers and their families, and the security presence is unobtrusive as it is largely unnecessary. And I've even got here in time for Neil Halstead.

This is the first time I have seen him do a full band set since he disbanded Mojave 3 and if I'm being honest I do prefer it when it's just Neil and his guitar; that careworn voice is one of a lone troubadour, although the strings do add a pleasing depth. It just seems like he's tilting too hard towards the Radio 2 market - in which case this is probably the best festival he could play at in terms of fanbase expansion. Funny that he started out - fronting archetypal shoegazers Slowdive - playing to a load of people sitting down (on the floor; it's what we did back then, and no, I'm not so sure why) and after a few years of normal audiences with Mojave 3 he's now playing to a load of people sitting down again, only these days they're on chairs. And quite a few of them may well be the same people. Well done to the guy for carving out a reasonably successful second career, though; in the grand scheme of things few people manage that.

Edwyn Collins very much did. Some songs are so rooted in what you were doing at the time that even the thought of them takes you back there: the long hot summer of 1995 I'd just started work at the same company who still employ me (yeah, I know, you'd get less for murder) and owing to a colleague with a desk radio I was experiencing for the first time the restricted nature of commercial radio playlists.The same eight songs, hour after hour after bloody hour - and given that most of the pop chart was as dire then as it is today, the regular play of Collins' somewhat unexpected monster-hit "A Girl like You" came as something of a relief. I recall one day as it played mentioning Orange Juice to the people in the office, to blank looks. Surely they (mostly five to ten years older than me, and hence just the right age) must remember The Sound Of Young Scotland? Nope? "Rip It Up", one of the first great crossover hits of the new indie generation? Vague glimmers. Disappointing for a music fan, but pretty good for Collins, a second crack of the whip if you like - even his Wikipedia entry says "Collins is best known for his single A Girl Like You", even if there didn't seem to be many hits after that. And then there was the double brain haemhorrage. Widely documented, not least by his wife and manager Grace Maxwell who has written a book about their experience.

The "Bowling Green" does not bear much resemblance to a bowling green; up in a little wooded glen it's almost like a festival within the festival with food stands and a couple of performance tents, and it's in one of these that Grace Maxwell is sitting on the stage, reading in almost impassively hushed tones from the book. She's describing one of the most horrible experiences anyone could have to cope with; the discovery by her young son of his father's apparently lifeless body and his calls to her; even knowing the story has a happy ending, we feel something of a chill. This is obviously the main reason why they're here - it is, as we don't really have to keep reminding ourselves, a literary festival - but it casts a strange shadow over the start of Edwyn's set. We feel like we're watching a Great Survivor, more for sympathy than for musical reasons; we shudder a little at his slurred speech and remember it could happen to any of us (and many wouldn't be physically strong enough to survive) and try not to look too much at the clasped and immovable hand which prevents him playing guitar (he's got three young blokes to do that for him). And then something weird happens. We start to forget. We're watching Edwyn fucking Collins, a musical legend of a generation (my companions at this point being all five to ten years older than me but they were clearly listening to the records my former workmates were not), and he's only playing "Falling And Laughing"!

And "Blueboy". And "Rip It Up". And "What Presence". One of our crew who was a big fan in her teens is almost in tears. And to be honest, dodgy hand aside, he looks a lot better than a lot of 50 year old former indie stars. Of course we get some stuff off the latest album that we don't know, but it's all good stuff, and then at the end it's time for that second-wind hit "A Girl Like You" and people are up and dancing. We walk back down to join our mates still buzzing.

It's still about three hours before British Sea Power's midnight set. I'd like to say we spend this time engaging in boundary-pushing cultural activities, but clearly this is not the case; we're in the bar. This week's ludicrous festival cocktails of choice: whisky and ginger for the boys (one of whom will look rather unwell in the morning), hot chocolate with Jack Daniels for the girls.  We are not sure what to expect from British Sea Power - they were billed as playing a soundtrack to "Winged Migration" but there doesn't appear to be a screen in the tent they're playing in; earlier in the evening we'd run into Scott who told us "I think we're going to do some... songs." This would probably be a good idea.

And what songs! Scott starts by picking up a bass, which in itself is asign of something a bit different - few BSP gigs start fronted by Neil, and it's rare live outings for "The Smallest Church in Sussex" and "The Land Beyond" which are first on the list, followed by their cover of "Come Wander with Me", the only sung track on the recent "Man of Aran" album. A glorious gift to the ten of us regulars who have made the trip and a relatively gentle start for the majority of the crowd who are probably not as familiar with the band's work anyway and wouldn't know a B-side from a single. But then it's all guns blazing into "Remember Me" and - you can't start a moshpit at a literary festival... can you? We have a go. It's not hugely successful, although a few people near us who are indeed seeing the band for the first time look like they're enjoying the set.

After that it's pretty much business as usual, although the ever developing nature of some of the older songs is very apparent tonight - the odd Krautrock middle section that "Spirit Of St Louis" has acquired over the past couple of years actually ends up in dub bass territory tonight, whilst the euphoric coda of "Carrion" has pretty much mutated into "Another Girl Another Planet" to the point where you can actually sing the last verse of the latter along to it and it ends at the right time. "Waving Flags" is an odd choice as the band are lacking keyboard and cornet man Phil, off on his honeymoon, but Noble asks the crowd to sing the absent sampled choir part - "just follow Geordie Mark". Mark has been drinking all day, and nobody could follow him if they tried, but it was worth a shot I suppose. And "Lately", the much-maligned opus with which even the most devoted fans got rather bored a few years back when it ended every single gig, sounds fragile and beautiful tonight as its ending does deranged.

How Mark manages to get covered in duct tape is completely beyond me, but I'm not surprised to hear that Noble was involved.

It's my favourite BSP set for at least a year, possibly more - and well worth the ridiculous effort involved to get here. Two years on from the best gig of 2007 comes a strong contender for 2009. I am going to look very carefully at any entertainment options available on 25th July in future years - but probably only the odd-numbered ones. If  2003 was the summer of British Sea Power, 2005 the summer of festival insanity and 2007 the summer of Maps, 2009 has been a glorious amalgamation of the lot. Thankfully someone else deals with how we are getting back to the Travelodge, and nobody cares at 2.30am how many people you have in a room. It's a long way home the next day but the traffic's kinder to us; the Sonic Cathedral compilation is still in the stereo and Daniel Land And The Modern Painters kick in just as we see a sign for Danny's original hometown of Tiverton. For some reason this seems deeply significant - it was a fucking ridiculous idea for a weekend, and it all worked perfectly. I drop Kev and Craig and Ali at Bristol Parkway 25 hours after I collected them from there and head on up the M5 and M6 home, promising myself I'm not going out for a few days. After all, with Maps in London on Thursday (still tickets available on Wegottickets) and British Sea Power's return to High Rocks on Sunday (also on Wegottickets, only a handful left) I'm looking forward to doing it all again in just a few days.

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http://www.myspace.com/thesandells
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