The Field Mice - music to walk alone by

Wrote this in January. For various reasons, didn't have the courage to post it until now. Ho hum...

Things changed. Things got harder. Someone who had become important to me was leaving the city. Leaving the country, even. I got into the habit of walking around the city by myself, sifting my thoughts. Before, we had walked together. At the same time I was trying to write a story about a man and a woman who have a disagreement on a London street and she walks off and they never see each other again. The story would be named after the particular street on which it was set. I needed to walk down that street a lot to be able to write the story. And these days I have that modern disability where I can no longer walk down a street without personal, piped music. Only one act could soundtrack this particular mood and moment: the Field Mice. After a while, I became convinced they must have written a song about this same street at the some point, for they did things like this, but if they did, I never found it.

I hadn’t listened to the Field Mice for exactly one year, when I was trying and failing to write a story about a different couple who see each other for the last time in a London park. Clearly, it’s a January thing. Again, I would walk around the park trying to think of the words the people in the story would say, and when doing so listened only to the Field Mice. Which tells me that in my head the Field Mice must be all about wintry melancholy, about leavings and frustrations and things you wish had worked out differently and things you imagined saying better in your head and things you never quite managed to say. They’re a band about that ache in your throat when you’re trying to say ‘I love you’ but end up saying ‘see you later’.

There have, I suppose, been other bands quite like the Field Mice, but they have never been exactly the Field Mice. There have been any number of sensitive types not averse to wearing both hearts and learning on their corduroy sleeves, bemoaning their repeat failures to sustain a relationship against a backdrop of guitar either acoustic or jangling. I've liked most of those bands too. But like Field Mice successor bands, such as the Trembling Blue Stars, who despite the odd moment, have never reached those same heights, those bands just aren't quite up to the same mark.

My love for those mid to late 80s jangling and shambling guitar bands, and their formative influence on me, is a matter of record. I doubt that any music will ever mean as much to me as that made by Razorcuts, McCarthy, the Bachelor Pad and Biff, Bang, Pow! when I was a shaky sixteen year old suspecting there was more to life than what was then this in a distant corner of the north west of England. That fey, anorak or amateruish music clustered around Sarah Records, now bracketed dismissively under the banner of twee, will always unlock something adolescent in me. But even amongst labelmates of that era, there was something of the outlier about the Field Mice. They were different. They were somewhat outside their time, outside fashion, resistant of labels. And they were songwriters.

It doesn't always work for me. There were too many Field Mice songs. There were all those slow, acoustic ones, fine enough, but which blur together. And of course the songs that did it for me then aren’t necessarily the ones that do so now. An alternate, basic version of ‘Everything About You’, that most simple of songs which offered a plausible substitute for the romance I hadn't then experienced at first hand, appearing on that favourite of formats, the flexi disc stuck to the front of a fanzine, issued by Caff Records, now seems to me a bit too simple. I loved 'Missing The Moon', their genre-defying leap, built around keyboards and repetition years before pale white boys started doing that sort of thing, but now when I hear it, it’s like I’ve used it up and it can yield no more, possibly because so many things now sound like that these days. But others have stepped up to take its place.

'Missing the Moon’s' b side, 'A Wrong Turn and Raindrops', now seems to me to offer the perfect soundtrack to present big city loneliness, the Thames tide ebbing in time to that harmonica lament as you cross a bridge alone. 'Sensitive' comes across as perfect credit roll music for the end of a film as the camera crane-shots up and we see a single and increasingly distant figure condemned to trudge forever across the snow. 'Emma’s House' is a gem that lay neglected for years, patiently saving its gleam. 'Let's Kiss And Make Up' and 'End Of The Affair' are two, six month apart chapters from the same sad story. And of course we will always, always, have 'So Said Kay'.

Argh, 'So Said Kay', surely one of the great songs of loss, longing, lust and departure? Ever known that feeling of not being able to give someone up, even when you know they're bad for you? Of knowing something can only fail but wanting every additional second of it any? Of being scared about how much it turns out you can care about someone and what that does to your insides? Of course you do. You’re human. And that's 'So Said Kay'.

With some reluctance, because the imagined words in my head are always different and sometimes better than the writer's intended lyrics, I googled the words of So Said Kay, finding them on a curious site. Just read them. Oh my god.

'I cannot leave you alone. Honestly I cannot.'

'Never seeing you again. I am scared to death.'

'Ride with me to the next station. I want to spend another half hour with you.'

They're raw and bare. They're the essence. Missing someone, wishing someone was here, they are how I feel. They're particular, and they're universal. Oh christ, this is just so fucking sad. This is a song that, sometimes, would be impossible to listen to.

The opening line of 'So Said Kay' of course provides the name of the definitive, two CD Field Mice collection, 'Where'd You Learn To Kiss That Way?', which might be all the Field Mice you'll need for your portable music player as you walk alone and lonely down cold streets, but it will be the gift that keeps on giving, year upon year. Astonishing, indeed, to realise that even this compilation has been around for more than a decade now. Doubtless the miracle of the internet ensures it remains an essential part of the fabric of our shared humanity. That there are fresh people out there still to cherish this fills me with hope in dark days.

A Sunny Day In Glasgow - 'Ashes Grammar'

How to describe this music? Shards, yes, definitely: shards of glass, crystal fractures. And those fractal pictures that were popular in the nineties. Things that jangle, like bells on cats. Ghosts and shadows. And sun shining on sheeted rain on recently-washed pavements: oiled rainbows that you tread through. Stars collapsing, that sort of thing. And obviously, a sonic cathedral, but an unfinished one: the Sagrada Familia, perhaps? In fact, this is music I’d like to hear in a church. On the right day, with this playing and sun pouring through a stained glass window and maybe just a hint of incense in the air, there’s a danger that through finding magic I might also find god.

Wow, this lot. Last year 'Scribble Mural Comic Journal' swept me away. Live, in some dingy West End hole, they overcame their drab surroundings to endear. It was magical even in the tight corridor full of chatting wankers that is most small London music venues. And now this record transfixes and continues to do so long past the point of novelty.

Layers, clouds, smiles, tears, the soundtrack of dreams: this is a record I want to fall asleep to. I want it messing with my head as I drift off, colouring night visions. I want it still playing when I awake, informing my lucid morning insights.

There's no point dwelling on individual songs, many of them short. ‘Too short to scrobble’, last.fm will tell me when I play some of them, but what do they know? The technology’s wrong then. It's all of piece, and divisions are arbitrary. One fragment folds into another. Voices come and go, just like tides do.

Of course this is all very post-My Bloody Valentine, and there are any number of shoegaze revivalists out there, and bands like Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear at the tip of this particular iceberg are in danger of leaving us slightly bored now, but dammit: no one is doing it better than these people, right now.

Girls - 'Hellhole Ratrace'

So by now, it having taken an age to write this, a fuller than average sequence of life events having passed since that initial 10” single – and what a beautiful format that remains – first snared my attention, we have all absorbed the coverage in the quality press; have noted the amusing photos, wherein the two gentlemen of the band are invariably surrounded by a bevy of diversely beautiful girls; have become intrigued by the back story of cults and abuse and loss and redemption; and have therefore been tempted to make the foray into internet or Rough Trade to buy the LP. We are, in short, already most of the way over Girls, our initial enthusiasm having been dampened by the fact that there’s really nothing that new on this LP, and god yes, now we’re being honest, it does sound a bit like Glasvegas, who themselves sounded a bit like...

We’re moving on. Girls was so last Friday. We’re even tired of this trend for reductive band names. Women, Girls.... now this really has to stop, before there’s just a band called Stuff. (I know, inevitably, you’re going to tell me, there is a band called Stuff, most likely attached to one of the lesser Suffolk higher education colleges.) And back in those innocent days of July when this first demanded our attention, this website could have looked cutting edge by banging on about how fabulous this single was, crucial days before printed media, whereas now we wheeze, limping last over the finish line in this particular music hype marathon.

We know, now, that this is the best thing on an LP where limp rock clichés too often abound. But dammit, this remains fabulous, and will still be so even in a couple of days when some other bunch of lo-fi Americans appear to offer the world’s new finest hopes.

This tune’s triumph is surely that it lasts for almost seven minutes yet consists mainly of the same thing repeated again and again. And as a long term passport holder of the Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, you can hazard a guess at how much I love the three Rs of repetition. It is already a matter of record in these very unviewed pages how much I care for a tune that only changes gear in one direction and builds up an ever more relentless head of steam.
Which is what we have here. It starts. It develops a chorus. And then the chorus repeats. And repeats. Every time you think it’s going to end, it doesn’t. Bagpipey guitars crash in at one point. They keep going. Then the chorus again. And again. And what should lose in effectiveness – isn’t it a shame that on the latest Art Brut record all the best lines are repeated eight times instead of thrown away with casualness for you to pick up on and pick over? – in fact gains. It is a tragedy, is it not, that some of us ever lost that childlike glee in one more, one more?

So for this, they can get our hopes up, let us down, and after that do their best never to bother us again. For these near seven minutes, I’ll remain grateful.

Fever Fever ' 'Keys In The Bowl'

Perhaps in an ideal world we would only ever listen to any piece of music once. We would have to form a fleeting impression and then be forced to fall back on our own unreliable memories to reconstruct any given tune, which would warp and morph as we went along. Imagine, we could all hear the same thing at the same time and then reconvene a year later with our own startingly diverged, personalised versions.

Although I've never managed to get along to one of their rare performances, I'm sympathetic to the idea of The Bays, who are only about playing live and doing something different each time, and reject the idea of release and recording. I admire most ideas taken to extremes.

Naturally I only embrace the theory. As someone who can no longer recall the colour of his carpet, lost as it is under the laval advance of vinyl and CDs, I demand the physical object. I buy records as a compulsion; I have this particular specialised form of the male illness. And overwhelmed as I am by a continuing, unfavourable distortion of that equation between quantity of records purchased versus time in which to play them, I now approach, albeit accidentally, the puritan position I toy with. I buy many seven inches, much of them not already heard, because I was struck by something I read, or some connection with something else I sort of like, or some record label with an above average strike rate. Many of them get played just the once. They travel the short physical distance from the pile of unplayed to a pile of played. Others take their place in the stack and they quickly become buried. In busy times, only the ones that stick out on first listen demand exhumation. Many, nothing wrong with them, simply good or okay, will be forgotten and moved to another pile.

There's always another pile.

So here was one - Fever Fever - that stood out on first listen and demanded repeat play. There was enough to suggest a smart purchase: from Norwich, which has of late compensated for the decline of its football team by becoming a niche provider of quirky, noisy Peel pop, and on our friends Cherryade records, which have offered us many seven inch shaped packages of joy these past few years. Sufficient there to pluck it from the racks. And on that first listen, socks were duly blown off. I'm always pre-programmed to love something like this: short, shouty, female fronted rock, keeps changing direction, crams ideas in. I loved it. Ever since I took time our from stealing furtive glances at my sister's Jackie magazines to develop a 70s crush on Suzi Quattro, I've always been a sucker for anything that combines racuous guitar with don't-give-a-fuck female vocals, I suppose.

So it's great, and all should own this, and here's a band to take an interest in, but it's just... well now I've played it again and again, in vinyl and in download, and repeat listens don't offer the same magic as that first blast. Whereas the version I'd have in my head if I had only heard this once: that would surely be the greatest tune ever.

Toddla T - 'Rice and Peas'

Hey it’s not all fey indie that harks back to that golden year 1986, time of anoraks and bowl haircuts, around here you know…

I am a great loser of objects. First I lost my leading brand of MP3 player. Then in short order I lost my mobile phone. Now, as a result of an expensive need to replace lost items, they are neatly combined into one, even easier and less convenient to lose package.

For the first time, I have taken out insurance.

Getting to grips with the new technology this presents, sort of akin to going straight from steam power to nuclear fusion, without any of the intervening stages, turns out to be fun. I’m no technophobe, me, I just don’t believe in upgrading for upgrade’s sake. But even in these ominous years where I totter towards the first digit of my age clicking over in a fairly significant way, I am finding new things I can do. For example, I’ve reactivated a dormant Twitter account, because now I can update it from the pub, which surely seems the point, and there in case you did not notice was the gentle invitation for you to sign up and ‘follow’, dreadful verb though that is. You may find the quality of your life improved by one or even two per cent by access to low-grade random observation if you do so.

One of things I’ve found fun is that on this new phone-cum-music-player thing I can play tunes direct, through tinny but quite loud speakers, unmediated by headphones. For someone who prefers his music from mostly ambient sources rather than pumped straight into his brain – I enjoy the interaction with found sound – this has been an intriguing development. Of course, it works with some music better than others. Fortunately I’ve never really been a symphonies kind of person. And there are limits. This stays in my kitchen. I’m not about to become a feral, blade-wielding 14 year-old deliberately annoying people with a shuffled playlist at a bus stop. I caught a train the other day and there was almost a whole blissful hour before someone saw fit to generously share with us all the dubious contents of his MP3 folder. Unprecedented.

Of course there are some things that work better out of tinny phone speakers than others. I was intrigued to hear that Wavves, who I adore, who is as important to me as anything else in music right now, deliberately encompasses and has fun with the distortion and degradation you get from MP3 compression. I’ve always loved lo-fi, never understood audio snobbery. (I download these massive flac files of Fall live bootlegs and instantly do the thing I’m not supposed to do and convert them into MP3s. It’s The Fall, for god’s sake.) Wavves sounds magnificent coming out of my phone speaker, by the way. And Toddla T sounds great, and this tune Rice and Peas has insistently burrowed its way into my brain.

I seem to recall this coming out last year in multiple versions on a couple of 7”s, which I bought and felt pretty cool about myself for, as the next person at the Sister Ray counter was asking after them but I had the last copies. They’ll be somewhere in the pile that has successfully mounted a campaign of occupation against my living room, and if I had a spare day and a student archeologist to hand I could probably unearth them. Now it resurfaces as obviously the best thing on a CD that’s been out for ages that I forgot I wanted and only found when I was looking through the racks for something else they didn’t have, and I decided just to buy everything I wanted beginning with T. Tinariwen it was I was looking for. Such is life.

Haven’t listened to the whole LP yet, to be honest, and find the linking bits of dialogue, presumably aimed at establishing Toddla’s street geezerness, annoying to say the least (I edit them out for the version of this that will underwhelm people on imminent CDs) but this paean to the urgent need to consume bad for you street food is just silly, uncomplicated fun of the sort that simply needs to be encouraged.

Even in the midst of a currently largely theoretical diet, I vibrate around the kitchen to this, phone in hand, immensely irritating my partner.

God Help The Girl - 'Funny Little Frog'

In the main, I feel I speak for the great swathe of humanity when I say, saints preserve us from side projects. These are usually pronounced, in the Half Man Half Biscuit manner, with an emphasis on the ‘o’. I yield to no man, for example, in my disdain for David Albarn, and his many dilettante excursions, and one day, dammit, I will be proved right and the rest of you turn out to have been misguided all along. And you will say sorry, and I will be gracious about it.

So it was that I approached God Help The Girl with some trepidation. Over time, and conquering some early misgivings, I have come to love Belle and Sebastian, albeit I remain slightly less enamoured of their more recent diversion into 70s pastiche. They occupy a special place in many of our hearts. This could clearly only be a unsatisfying digression.

And yet, and yet... this LP, and this tune in particular, is what I find myself wanting to listen to on my latest portable music player that replaced the most recently lost portable music player, on my longer than customary walks to work as I make that late, vain gesture towards fitness, as apparently people do when they reach this age... where was I?

Right now London is mostly sun-kissed, and as I tread its eastern and northern reaches early mornings thinking sweet thoughts, this cute, breezy, mostly female sequence seems to offer the perfect soundtrack.

Soundtrack it is, of course, in its chin-stroking way, to a still unmade film. You can see that, or rather hear it. You invent the pictures, can imagine your own film, as you listen. And maybe that’s better. Perhaps that part of the fun. You can, possibly should, invent your own film to go with this. And in this relativist age, they will all be right.

We don’t actually have to see the eventual film, do we? We can spare ourselves that particular disappointment. Surely when it comes to making films about impossibly cute girls pairing with men who deserve rather less, in which people sit around smoking and talking too much, that is what the French are for anyway?

Slightly more than half of this LP really does it for me right now, and that, as you three regulars may recall, is somewhat more than contemporary average. True, it goes on too long, as most things do, and tails off near the end, ditto, where it veers dangerously close to easy listening. It’s perhaps a white wine spritzer sort of record, but then it’s been so hot lately I’ve been drinking mostly white wine (so much more interesting than the vastly overrated water the authorities continually advise us to carry a bottle of). There’ll be time yet for those other essential flavours: for the mead, blood and spunk of honest rock and roll, the cider of folk, the vodka of anything electronic and the sticky cocktail of ‘world music’.

Chief gem here, for me – the white Bordeaux in a sea of chardonnay, if we must keep flogging this metaphor – is 'Funny Little Frog'. It probably helps that this is a cover of one of the least lovely Belle and Sebastian tunes, and done exactly how I want it to be – lush, laden with synthetic soul, and heaped with artificial sweeteners, which will turn out to be bad for you. I want, and I'm not ashamed to say it, some strings in my life just now. Somehow too its tale of an imaginary love works better with the gender switched. Perhaps it makes it less creepy. Of course, I may just be saying that because I’m a man.

Proper LP soon though, hmm?

Why The Smiths changed my life

So, as the occasional facetious correspondent has pointed out, it's been a while.

Well, what can I say? I do a beyond full-time job, and between you and me I mostly love the work, but at the same time my late 30s self still clings to those adolescent notions that I should do creative things alongside. The longer I've gone on, by the way, the more I've become convinced that the purpose of any creative act is not to win approval of or even find an audience; the primary point of creation is surely to give fulfillment to its creator. The act is all that matters, even if it is performed in a void. I believe it’s enough, although of course it may just be that I never really found an audience anyway.

Regardless, this is the time that gets squeezed when work takes over, as it has done lately, and only gets resumed when some chance conversation, usually with someone who is both younger and a woman, fires me into believing that I need to get going again. So I found myself disinterring something I started back in the cool, short days of February and never quite had the belief to complete.

The starting purpose of this website, albeit too often hamstrung by the sporadic nature of its contributions, is mostly to celebrate the new and exciting, to wax briefly and enthusiastically about something from the week that has made me smile, or excited me, or moved me in some way, before the next glinting, shiny thing comes along. But sometimes I must uphold the right to bang on about something of the past which somehow helped to make me whatever it is I am today.

My musical abiding love is, of course, and always will be, The Fall. They remain a guiding light, a magnetic north. They weren't my first love, though. The first shoots of a lifelong interest in music were provided by early 80s two-tone bands, and then lots of bands on a spectrum of electronic to new romantic, some of them good, like the pioneering Sheffield bands, and most of them so unspeakably bad I hesitate to recall their names. But then The Smiths came along, and after that everything was different.

They were the first band I got obsessed with. I mean, really obsessed. I would go to Manchester and in my head construct elaborate narratives where I would bump into Morrissey and floor him with carefully prepared, off the cuff bon mots. We’d bond; become friends. Maybe I’d guest on a b side.

Although when I say obsessive, I should make clear I stopped some way short of stalker status. I wasn't ever quite the gladioli wielding, hearing aid wearing acolyte. I don't do identity cults, have never believed in wearing the badges. Apart from a brief, ill-advised attempt to look like a young Bobby Gillespie, I cling to civilian clothes. I like to retain the option of passing unremarked in a crowd. And I was usually a chunky boy, whereas you needed to be slim-hipped and androgynous to get away with the Morrissey look. But there was a time, 15 or 16, lonely, vulnerable, and not yet having had my mind duly opened or softened by the discovery of girls and alcohol, when nothing mattered more to me than this band.

Of course it was singer Morrissey who I idolised. More than anything it was about the words, the ones he wrote and uttered. They were playful and pretentious, but self-undermining, smart but insecure, educated, obscure and iconic. They were words for any kid who though they were cleverer than the rest of the class but still desperately wanted to be part of the gang.

The Smiths looked, too, provocatively, deliberately, like outsiders. They stood apart. Even the record sleeves, with their cataloguing of obscure, often fallen, small celebrities were different, resembling nothing else, forcing you to do your own research. Then there was the name, with its deliberate anonymity: so right.

Imagine the impact on this white trash kid from a failed family in a small and isolated northern town where everything taught you to conform and accept your lot.

Occasionally, and usually when I've had a little too much to drink, I will insist to the unwilling listener that The Smiths changed my life. Said listener will assume I exaggerate.

It's impossible to convey, in an era of instant access to everything, and people thinking they're part of a community because they've joined an online group, quite how stranded you could be in the mid 80s. The occasional samizdat, roughly photocopied fanzine could give you a hint that people like you were out there somewhere, beyond the physical boundaries of your designated town. But you couldn’t find them, unless you had someone common to follow. And how to convey the drabness, the lack of glamour, the sheer defeatedness of post-miners' strike small town northern England, collapsed, redundant, bypassed by the pinstripe and braces yuppificiation of big cities and the south? We were Thatchered, and we had no response. Plus, as kids, we grew up members of a pre-millennial death cult, brought up on horror stories about nuclear winter and convinced, as Reagan made jokes about bombing Russia, that an armageddon was not only inevitable but imminent, so what was the point of an education, or even forming close relationships? Thatcher's adopted children, as compared to those born in her wake, were an unusually fucked-up generation. The consequences, as we became parents, we live with today.

So The Smiths came along and taught me there was more. They told me you could be smart, and clever, and you didn't have to hide it. You didn't have to fit in. It was okay to read books, to like art. Occasionally I think about the life I could have led: the WMC on a Friday night, bargain booze deals, knocked off fags, a tracksuit, an Ann Summers party-going wife, three mewling brats gradually being ground down, TV, a package holiday. That was what you prepared for. That was your lot.

The Smiths told me to aim higher. The irony is that the new right told us to be aspirational while marginalising our kind. It was the counter-force to this that made me aspire. I'm not always happy with my life - never feel I've done anything, know I'm never going to get more than a few thousands word into any novel I might write, and that first film will remain resolutely unmade - but I feel my horizons are broader than they might have been, that my life is more filled with art and ideas than would otherwise have been the case - and I think, in part, that was thanks to the education The Smiths provided at precisely the right moment. How can I ever not be grateful?

I leave The Smiths alone for long stretches these days. Other music crowds in. I can go years without listening to more than the odd thing. A quick blast of wilfully eccentric Shakespeare's Sister livens me, while the ultimate doomed romance of There Is A Light That Never Goes Out marks the end of an occasional compilation that the CD recipient never captures the full weight of. The songs can't always meet my expectations, when I hear them. I've made them mean too much to me. And of course I can't adequately explain this to other people.

When I do come back to them now, there are new things I hear and like. As if for the first time, I've come to acknowledge and admire Johnny Marr's exceptional guitar playing, appreciate how the tunes are neither subservient to nor undermine the words, and recognise how hard that must have been. I see now what an extraordinary, one off pairing that was. The tragedy of Morrissey and Marr is that they needed each other, and without each other, are a fraction, far less than half.

Because of The Smiths, I can forgive Morrissey everything, though I now find his persona tiresome, and care for only a handful of his solo offerings. But on each LP, the one or two semi-precious gems are enough, because of The Smiths. And while it's hard to resist the feeling that Marr has frittered away his talent in a slew of near session-musicanship, interspersed with spells of just wanting to be a regular dude in a rock and roll band, the serrated guitar of How Soon Is Now is always going to be enough

You know they're both never going to find it again, and that’s part of it. And this means they must buck the trend, must stay unique, and be the only band of any significance never to reform.

But then I never did seem them live, my gig-going days only starting when I escaped from my town to university, and carrying on pretty much ever since. So equally, as I always say, if they ever did get back together, I'd sell a kidney to be there.

What prompted this, sometime back in February, unfinished, was the issue of the two CD collection, The Sound of The Smiths, bought, in a wearying nod to my own personal zeitgeist, in some airport on the way to somewhere. It reminded me precisely how magical, how pivotal, how alchemical The Smiths were. If you don’t have this, if you don’t get it, how on earth are you going to navigate your way through the speed bumps and slaloms of the rest of your life?

Simply, find a guidebook in this.

The June Brides - 'There Are Eight Million Stories...'

There was something so right about last Friday night. By the time it kicked off, we were just about sufficiently intoxicated, via dubious South African brandy, incongruous pints of mild and, at the venue itself, red wine of a somewhat challenging nature. From beloved Hackney we made our way to the venue, a new one to us, a room above a 1960s concrete snooker hall on one of Stoke Newington's less fashionable streets. We paid our five pounds to get in, bought drinks from an impromptu, jerry built bar. The stage area was defined by two semi-circles of battered leatheresque armchairs and sofas in a distressed condition. There were two vacant chairs that we made our own. As we sat back and sipped Chateau Usine, we reflected that the evening had been pretty good already.

We don't do reunions as a rule. I have no wish, for example, to be reacquainted with former schoolfriends - even those handful who have, as yet, evaded Strangeways - from whom I have probably drifted for very good reasons. And in music, it's better, in the main, not to look back. We caught the Pixies a couple of times in the past, largely to try to compensate for missing them the first time around, and I hope The Smiths never reform, but if they do, I'll fork out ready money to be first in the queue. So there I was a few days before on the point of buying tickets for something achingly cutting-edge when some random internet pootling revealed The June Brides would be getting together for one rare night, and I knew, reunion or not, that I had to be there.

You probably don't know this, but the June Brides were one of the most important groups in the history of British music. Ever. Knocking around at about the same time as The Smiths, they were also one of the groups who changed my life and made me realise there was something more out there, something a bit more interesting, something other than what I had been told was on offer. They set a template that was played with by all my favourite bands of my late 80s salad days. They were jangling, shambling, literate and nerdy, loser indie popsters and wringers of wry smiles, and on most tunes there were these ridiculous parping trumpets.

But they burned too briefly, 1984 to 1986, which crucially for me was before I left my smalltown behind and started being able to go to gigs. It has always rankled. About every two years I come back to the music. 'This Town', an achingly happy and sad almost celebration of life in an English Nowhereton, still seems to be about me. 'In The Rain' still has that meaning of life clarity you get from sitting in a pub wondering what you're doing there when everyone around seems to be having a great time. 'Sick, Tired and Drunk' probably wasn't supposed to be a manifesto for living, but that's how it seemed to turn out for me. It would be quite wrong for British music to have anything like a hall of fame, but if we did, the June Brides would need to be in it.

So a reunion should have seen them feted, makers of a black market of soaring ticket prices, diarised by thousands on last.fm. Instead we got a couple of hundred people somewhere handy for the railway station. But there was something bang on about it all. This was no Sex Pistols style latest sell-out because they need the money, man. There were reformed for all the right reasons, because it was the singer Phil Wilson's brother's 50th birthday (ironically nodded to by a Fall song the name of which you could probably guess beforehand) and he fancied seeing a gig. And for once, there was nothing wrong with seeing a bunch of blokes themselves circling a half century and of a certain thinness of hair and growing thickness of waist banging their way through a load of old numbers. Thankfully, there was little of the we have new material to try out nonsense here. In an endearingly under-rehearsed way they made their way through most of 1985's seminal LP, their only, There Are Eight Million Stories, and by the time they had shuffled off after about an hour, had performed every song you really wanted them to play.

It was a perfectly mellow evening, spent with a roomful of the mostly rotund and ageing, and therefore relatively free of the poseuring nonsense and look at me chat that bedevils many a London gig. Normally I go to gigs and look for someone old and fatter than me so I can stand beside them. Here, I found myself at least at the youthful end of the spectrum. Most of these people had been a bit older than me when they realised the genius of the June Brides. Ridiculously, our heroes where not even the night's main band, being merely the support act for some people called S/T, about whom I confess I know nothing. We hung around, hoping for something metronomically krautrocky, but after the faithful three songs rule was applied we found them wanting, not least for some Flight of the Conchordsish thing about being put on hold on the telephone, and ambled off into the night looking for a little more liquid.

You can, apparently, although I have yet to put this to the test, listen to the whole thing here.

Not really a gig review, but then we don't really do gig reviews here. Being pretty forward-looking people, we don't really do nostalgia either. Except when we really want to. I have now heard 'This Town' performed live, so there.

Wild Billy Childish and the Musicians of the British Empire - He's Making A Tape'

And speaking, as we just were, of simple, direct music, and the joys of neglected seven inchers unearthed over the post-festive fag days, here's another. At some point, you just have to give in and learn to love Billy Childish, even if you can't hope to buy or even listen to the roughly one record a week he issues of stripped-down, just getting on with it, garagey early Who homage.

This one is a bit different because for a change he doesn't sing it, leaving vocal duties to the female member of his current band, who is presumably the one who dresses as a nurse live. Hey, if you're going to dress up as something, dress up as a nurse. That's what I say. There's something hard-wired into the heterosexual male psyche which means this is always going to work. Anyway...

Right now I much love this playful, deliberately anachronistic nod to the role that home-made music compilations can play in romantic entanglements. Confess I made a few myself over the years, shy love letters concealed in the form of other people's music, their subtle sub-texts too often falling on stony ground, missed by a listener who turned out to be more cloth-eared than I hoped. But enough about me, for which of us hasn't at some point, when briefly dazed by the could-be girl of our dreams, attempted to express emotions we otherwise couldn't by crafting careful sequences of songs? And yes, it is generally boy to girl. As emotional inarticulacy usually goes hand in hand with trainspotting musical enthusiasm in us hapless guys, that's how it tends to work.

Of course, and alas, we no longer make tapes any more (although I maintain that the format will make its comeback, and in time this tune may come to be seen as prescient). It just isn't the same somehow now, putting together CDs on our home computers, where you can continually re-order and fit things perfectly to time. There was something special about the homespun glue and scissors days of the C90 compilation tape, where you had to guess what sequencing would work as you went along, trusting your simple instincts for a killer segue and hoping you got to the end of that final clinching tune, so often something by The Smiths, before the tape hissed out. When you gave one of these to people, with a hand-filled inlay card and maybe some added personal decoration, you were giving them an object of love. The modern CD is a far more clinical, impersonal and ultimately disposable affair. It can't carry the same meaning.

So when the protagonist here comes home and finds her other half immersed in making a tape for someone else, she knows he's in trouble. The relationship sounds doomed to me. I'd get out while you can, love. And, err, bring the nurse's uniform with you.

Damaged Goods are offering us this, and for that we should thank them. I bet no one ever thanks record labels, but then I am quite drunk as I write this.

Thee Vicars - 'Don't Try To Tell Me'

Okay, so for once let’s cut with the pretentious and elliptical opening paragraph and get down to it, shall we? What’s doing it for me today is this no-nonsense, straight-edged new garage classic. Thee Vicars – and I have never understood that ‘thee’ thing in band names, and expect I never will – offer us via Dirty Water Records two swift vinyl sides of fast, clean, beer-chucking thrills. You get drums, guitars turned up loud and trebly and urgent vocals, and there are times when that’s the whole package. Sure, you have to be young, dumb and full of spunk to get away with making records like this, but fortunately you have to be none of those to end up pogoing around your own living room to them. Evidently Thee Vicars come from the hole that is Bury St Edmunds, and this must be the sound of the frustration that too many Saturday nights spent there would drive you to. As it happens, they sound more like they come from our beloved North Kent Coast, as this fits firmly in with the back to basics Medway punk style pioneered by the prolific polymath Billy Childish himself.

Of course it’s been out for an age, and there’s a subsequent LP that now demands attention, but post-Christmas saw me do some valuable work cutting a swathe through the vast and tottering pile of unplayed seven inches, and unearthing an occasional gem such as this is what makes it all worthwhile.

Beyond the record, I bet this lot would kick any number of asses live, and it will become my business to catch them. I’d love to see them down the Dirty Water Club at the Boston Arms, surely London’s most democratic music venue, and one of the best, on a Friday night with far too much booze inside me. If there's anything right in this world, it will surely happen.

The Dierdres - 'Sir Michael of Aspel'

I swear, I do listen to other things. At work, where I daily clock in to toil at the coalface of pointlessness, I listen to a fair bit of African music, which it pleases some to call 'world music', and get through a lot of reggae, although reggae is one of those things I seem to fall out of love with from time to time, this being one of them. But when time comes and guilt prompts me to fill some of this vacant space in my own corner of the vast irrelevance of the internet, the only thing I want to write about is shouty, annoying, slapdash, punky music like this.

What's on offer here from this apparently seven piece band is a foul-mouthed, unhinged tribute to the legendary TV survivor, who I've always regarded as a pretty decent guy. It features a cameo appearance by the man himself, and would seem to be based on a scarcely credible 'Antiques Roadshow' encounter between the band and presenter. Can this actually have happened? In this universe, or a parallel one? In a little under two minutes, the Dierdres, or at least a number of them simultaneously, confess their psychotically complicated love for the Aspel, and if I was him, I'd be flattered but also get a restraining order.

Early Au Pairs (and try googling that) are an obvious point of reference, and there's nothing wrong with that. Basically, to slip into a little Dierdre-ease, I fucking love this record, and anyone who doesn't agree is a prick. The world is now a bit more of a better place for this.

It's on Cherryade, who are on a real roll, what with this, the Lovely Eggs and the Kabeedies, or you can download from the world's major online music retailer. Of course in vinyl form it's a b-side, which has something so right about it. Sometimes, just sometimes, it so happens that a-sides are better, but not too often.

High Places - 'Vision's The First...'

One of the invented traditions of the household is that over the course of the festive period - roughly defined as covering the spell between Christmas Eve and whenever we must depart to bring light to the lives of our adoring relatives in a series of small, drab and not even particularly snowy northern towns - only appropriately seasonal music may be played. Fortunately or otherwise I have over the considerable stretch of my existence acquired a vast quantity of poor grade yuletide indie tuneage by the yard. There’s about a solid day’s worth of such, which each December 24th gets duly transferred to the trusty MP3 player and before New Year’s Eve (and there are, of course, even one or two decent songs about that particular dark night of the soul too) is equally quickly removed to free up some space for further swathes of live Fall bootlegs. The thing is, Christmas tunes can’t be innately bad, because even The Fall have recorded several of them over the long, long years. It’s just, they’re never as good as a band’s proper, non-festive work, are they? Would you choose to listen to even The Fall’s Xmas offerings ahead of their regular stuff? Just like in the real world, in music, no one saves their best for Christmas.

So it will come as some relief on the train north when once again regular listening habits will be resumed. First up will be this tune, from High Places, with which I am thoroughly beguiled. As usual, I am late on this one, and, as is equally customary, I know next to nothing about the band. This surfaced as a single on Upset the Rhythm, who also put on catchable gigs in old London town, and subsequently led me to a CD available from the redoubtable Thrill Jockey label. It’s a mysterious, slight and charming thing, distorted, like an favourite old tune found mangled on a chewed up Memorex tape (and I swear, cassette tapes are about to make a comeback). It’s a jaunty pop number - I hear Rihanna’s immortal Umbrella in this - mingled with and undermined by the shimmering clutter you get in A Sunny Day In Glasgow and the by now customary global village rhythms. It's a fractured kaleidoscope of a song. A smidgen of steel drum I hear at one point, for example. You could dance to this, but you'd probably dislocate something.

This is not the sort of website that offers up top ten lists of the year, but if it was, there's a good chance this would be on it. Once again I note in closing they're from New York. They own us these days.

The Wave Pictures - 'Long Island'

Our love for the Wave Pictures is already a matter of record, although when they first crossed the path of attention, we admitted some doubts. Not so now. We’ve since been utterly sucked into their world, and there seems to be little we can, or indeed want, to do about it. That single, I Love You Like A Madman and subsequent LP Instant Coffee Baby were our gateway drugs. Live they then clinched the deal. They’re pretty much the ultimate finely honed, value for money, good time guaranteed live band, inheriting the mantle - not that any criticism is thereby implied - from our old friends the Broken Family Band, as the act you could catch time and again at one of their frequent live shows and always know you were going to enjoy yourself. Now we see the Wave Pictures whenever we can, and we raid backwards through their back catalogue, past previous LP Sophie (while noting with bewilderment the inclusion of Instant Coffee Baby on the best debut LP of the year shortlist of those with it hep cats the Guardian) to the slew of early, rough and ready and utterly charming CD-Rs.

Long Island - wherein someone looks beautiful in lubricant - first surfaced, unless you know better, on Sophie, and was recently given a wash and brush up as part of a digital only EP, Pigeons, from the behemoth iTunes. Being venerators of the physical object, we’re not sure if we approve of the idea of the virtual only release (although we love seven inchers that come with free download codes, which help us sleep easier at nights) but this would appear to have been done for good, green reasons. Hey, we care about the planet here, even to the extent of reducing our meat rations and taking the occasional holiday in Wales, so this is to be applauded. This is the one where they walked to the studio, ran the equipment on wind power, mastered it using discarded brown, organic bread crusts, had only fresh rainwater for lunch etc. In its original form Long Island was a firm family favourite and in its new guise it only gains from a more muscular re-working. You could dance to this one, prior to hoping to win a grand in your hand on a Friday night. It’s all pianos and handclaps and sparkly, slinky clothes. You know when Orange Juice went disco? It’s nearly as good as that.

In short, we like. But then, you knew we were always going to do. And now we're off to see them live again.

The Dodos - 'Winter'

There are, ultimately, only so many ways of saying fuck, this is great, but fuck, this is great.

Here's a precise, controlled offering from the Dodos, the latest in a wave of US bands who wash up on these shores and do what we used to do ourselves, only better. It comes in cycles. Just accept it. It's their turn, and hey, America's cool again now, right?

Their stuff is a heady mix of disparate influences, and there is pointy-headed musicological fun, if you are that way inclined, to be had in unravelling them. Right now West Coast psychedelia, modern folk, the Walker Brothers maybe and more recently Beirut are springing to mind, but whenever I say something like this someone will correct me and leave a spot-on comment underlining what a cloth-eared dolt I really am. A year later. Or how about they're sort of like Yeasayer, but without the Genesis thing going on? This one's simple and complex at the same time, always a winning combination in this parish. Deep, eighties indie drums are joined by what I'd very much like to be a mandolin, and then lucious, almost crooning vocal. Someone appears to have been having a bad time of it, but will be over the worst ere next spring. Then a mournful bit of brass completes the job.

And of course it is, err, winter right now, at least in this particular hemisphere, but this is, for once, no lame attempt on this website's part to be topical. Tales of regret and longing suit any season, and I stumbled upon it only recently via the magic of Hype Machine, where you can find this and more. It is now frequently played on that great radio station that goes in my head and finds its way onto many a CD pressed into the reluctant hands of bewildered and begrudging acquintances. It's from an LP called Visiter - ah, those cute mispellings - which has been out for an age and which for some reason I don't seem to have, and for this I can only beg forgiveness and promise to take according corrective measures.

The Lovely Eggs - 'Have You Ever Heard A Digital Accordion?'

Oh, by the way, this is now officially the new best thing ever, and replaces all previous best things ever. We had a meeting about it and that was what was decided, okay? As is often the case, the Massive Crush taste committee were a little late getting around to this particular agenda item, as this tune has been huge in the world of proper music blogs that you can download stuff from for literally weeks, but you do realise how hard it is to get us all together for a meeting?

Anyway, we need new words in the English language to describe the casual and slightly crap genius of this latest offering. It's playground, nursery rhyme stuff, childishly sung, in a Talulah Gosh sort of way, that offers a new and escalatingly bizarre hipster checklist by which you will be judged and will fail. At which point they will sigh 'oh dear' and move on to the slimmer guy with a better cardigan than you and a full set of Pastels badges. It's the aural equivalent of one of those word ladder games that go from hate to love in five steps, taking us from digital accordions to time travelling in a De Lorean via a route that could best be described as entirely arbitrary. And then it rocks out. Of course you hear the Moldy Peaches in this and all your favourite mid to late eighties shambling anorak bands, and is there anything wrong with that exactly?

So, the Lovely Eggs. We love them. This forms part of a value for money five tune seven incher which gets quite Bearsuity and for which we're indebted to Cherryade records, whose releases are very rarely not worth a listen. Rudimentary googling, meanwhile, reveals a connection to the once-revered Angelica, who made us very happy once upon a time with 'Teenage Girl Crush'. Around these parts we prefer to listen to our music rather than watch it, but an amusing and indeed mildly disturbing video is also to be seen on the ubiquitous YouTube.

Go to it, kids. This is an order.

Vivian Girls - 'Where Do You Run To'

My most recent alien abduction was at least rather shorter than that which once took this website out of circulation for about two and a half years. At least two of you have been in touch to express concern about my whereabouts. Well, what can I say? Sometimes life happens, and sometimes work happens, and sometimes both happen at the same time, and sometimes I even get the two mixed up. But back confined to this humble planet pop, what has been missed? Tottering piles of CDs and sevens, and bland folders full of sound files, demand attention. The products of three figure gleeful plunders of record shops, the only trolley dash I ever really do, lurk largely with their price stickers intact, a sure sign that they have yet to be adequately dealt with. It occasionally occurs to me that an obsession with sound has ruined my life, but I’m not sure I’d have had it any other way. And some palpably good things have floated up of late. Of the various crystal bands, Crystal Stilts may turn out to be the best. I’ve also found myself begrudgingly admiring this TV on the Radio LP, even though it sounds like music I don’t think I like, and getting to grips with Gang Gang Dance. I need to listen to Those Dancing Days more, but seem too busy working my way through the Wave Pictures’ back catalogue, having now, working backwards, reached the delights of their early, self-released CD-Rs. That Mirror Mirror LP with the preposterous name is continuing to puzzle me - I still can’t quite work out if it’s brilliant or terrible - and Chairlift, via an advert for a music player, appear to have become famous. If we were the sort of website which we are not, we would claim that we championed them first. Then I’ve spent the last week immersed in a slew of frankly varying bootlegs from the recent live adventures of The Fall (I spent two nights at the Hackney Empire with them, one great, one good) and, following a recent gig, realising once again the skewed genius of Connan Mockasin. There’s enough there for you to get stuck into, no?

This self-titled Vivian Girls LP, which has of course been out for an age, has got me under its thumb a bit too. It’s taking me back to where it all started, and to the music of my youth, mid 1980s shambly, jangly, guitar music: a seminal, and indeed political movement, although we didn’t realise it at the time. I thought music was always like that. Only later would it become clear to me that we were living at a special moment, where for once music would not be about bombast, swagger and sex, but about those other human things like embarrassment, frailty and making a bit of a mess. Bands were amateurish and tried their best. It was art, but it wasn’t art wank. I’ve been looking for that honesty and simplicity ever since, while that era, mislabelled at the time as C86, mislabelled since as twee, occasionally spirals back into vogue, as seems to be the case now.

So how could my teenaged, shy, anorak-wearing self know that my late 30s fat, creased and frankly ugly incarnation would really be getting into a record that sounds a lot like the Shop Assistants? The whole thing’s brief. There’s ten songs on this LP, but the Vivian Girls get in and get out in 20-odd minutes. I admire this. There are too many hour-long CDs in the world already. And the whole thing sounds like it was recorded in a biscuit tin. The guitars thrash and the drums flail and both are equal. The choruses are more important than the verses. The vocals are tinny. All of this is great. I think my favourite tune here is Where Do You Run To, with its Mary Chain bass but annoying lack of question mark, but really, all the songs sound pretty much the same. And that’s part of the point. I just wish it was on a series of flexi discs rather than a CD.

White Denim - 'Mess Your Hair Up'

Or talking about hype, as we were, there's White Denim, who emerged top of the pile in the most recent South by South West hype contest, something nobody on this island truly understands. I resisted because, well, you do, don't you, if you have any sense of your value as an individual human unit. But come on - or is that c'mon? - this record's great, pure and simple, and only the churliest of churls could not admit this, and although the boat has long departed and you all know this by now for yourselves, I felt these words banging against the inside of my skull about it and I needed a vent. Indeed, I now feel bad it's taken me a while to get onto this one in front of all four of our readership. (Can you let me know when your birthdays are, by the way? I'd like to make sure I send you cards.)

What we have here is the sound of a small group of young men who don't know there are any rules about what you are supposed and not supposed to do in music and aren't particularly interested in finding out what those rules may be. It was recorded in whatever the Texan equivalent of a shed is and it sounds like it. It has that raw, rough and readiness to it you look for in a debut record. There's dirt under its fingernails. It smells of sweat and puke and back of the Chevrolet sex with your cousin. There's bad beer, late nights and all being men together. One of the base ingredients here is dumb, ballsy, what-the-hell music, of the kind you find in early Who. And there’s a fair amount of grubby southern blues too, and there is absolutely nothing wrong in this. An obvious comparison is the Black Keys, back when they were on the mighty Fat Possum label and before they got old, clichéd and boring. But there's more going on here than that. They would also seem to have a fine sense of the dynamics of a tune and when to interfere with them. They use repetition and fracture to keep your expectations on their toes. Less is sometimes more, and it’s sometimes as interesting to take something away as add things. They have an understanding of space that reminds me more of classic dub reggae than anything else, and the same kind of homemade feel you got when people were working with limited technology, although obviously the rhythms are different.

Take this song, Mess Your Hair Up. It's a balls-out rock tune, alright. But then it starts, stops again, gets locked in a mad wah-wah loop, things drop out. What is more satisfying than a tune where you know all possibilities have been explored, and all within five minutes? Isn’t it frustrating when you feel there was a bit more in there, if only the band had done a little more digging?

So revivalist, yes, and involved in the business of fusion, perhaps, but the inventiveness and sheer evident love of what they’re doing in this conquered the hype. Naturally they’ll have used all their ideas up in one go and the next one will be flat and turgid as they take the humdrum path towards straight rock and drab Americana, but for now, this is one to cherish.

Glasvegas - 'Daddy's Gone'

We are, in this humble, dusty corner of the internet, resisters of hype. Press buzz deters us. The NME is a comic, and we mourn the days when you might be able to pick it up and take as much as half an hour to get from front to back. And most music blogs are - is there any other way of saying this? - shit. Vacuous look-at-mes who somehow think they're on the cusp of a career rush to break the latest, newest thing. Anything new is good. It's all fresh blood. Break it, be first, then move on for the next. It doesn't matter whether it's the 27th faint carbon copy of something which once might have had some life in it. Forgive me, I'm tired. But what very seldom comes across is a sense of the life-affirming joy music can bring, the adrenalin it can push through your sytem, the tears it can drag from your eyes.

So Glasvegas have been hyped to buggery. But you can only listen with your ears, and it turns out about half the LP is really good. You couldn't I suppose, hope for one that could be great all the way through. This, presently, is rare. It dips in the middle. But I don't mind. I've always been the lover of the single anyway. And one of those, 'Daddy's Gone', has made itself essential to my life at the moment. Of course it's histrionic and overstated, but I've always kind of liked a little bit of that. The lazy comparison of the music press is the Jesus and Mary Chain, which must be largely on the basis that they come from the same place. True, I can hear a shared love of Phil Spector, but for me the obvious comparison is the Mighty Wah!, for whom I've long nursed a soft spot. It has the same over-ambitious, slightly failed poetry in it, the same gutter-looking-in-the-stars thing, all working class regret and aspiration, choked throat early morning drunk dreams and bruised sentimentality.

Of course, they must never make another record.

The Kabeedies - 'Palindromes'

"Most of my parents are palindromes: M U M and D A D."

Yes! It's obvious but how come no one's said it before? This is brilliant, stupid and just a bit shit, always obviously a winning combination. This lot, The Kabeedies, sound like they just can't sit still. They're evidently an itchy hyperactive bunch. And here's a short, jerky, dumb and smart offering. Boy/girl singer combination. Really good. No need for sentences.

I'm never going to stop liking stuff like this, am I? This is the third or fourth cycle of this kind of thing coming into vogue - hey, remember Bis, and weren't they great at first? - and it often seems to hail from Norwich. This one surfaced on NRONE records, with which we've already confessed we're in love, and I recall an earlier single I enjoyed, 'Lovers Ought To' on the fairly reliable Cherryade label. Of course they're sickeningly young and have a terrible name (but then as I type I'm listening to and enjoying a band with the worst name ever of Thomas Tantrum) but I reckon they should do this for two years and then get their hair cut, grow fat and boring and go and work in a bank somewhere, if there are any banks left to work in by then. I'm going to make sure I see them live, even though I know I'll be the oldest fucker there.

Chairlift - 'Bruises'

I couldn’t wait for this one to make its appearance in the UK. I bought this direct from the venerable Kanine records in the US. I needed to have it. The internet makes this music thing easy. And the pound/dollar rate isn’t what it was, but still, what I paid in postage I saved on the CD. In truth, not all of this record, nonsensically entitled Does You Inspire You, does it for me. There are times when it all gets a bit too knowing, the musical equivalent of comparing ironic 80’s fringes. There’s sometimes an obviously too kitsch kind of oriental synth thing going on there. Chairlift, you feel, are not above the odd arched eyebrow.

But ah, this, Bruises, first heard as a demo a bit back, is beautiful and fragile and, apart from its ending where they couldn’t resist adding a layer of whipped cheese, understated. Love hurts, and there’s a truth that cuts through any amount of tongue in cheek. There’s a childlike simplicity and repetition in the lyrics of this, but sweetness comes mixed with darkness. What self-abasement wouldn’t you perform for the one you love? Then the man comes in singing about frozen strawberries at precisely the right moment. And you never thought frozen strawberries could sound sad and romantic, until now.

This apparently comes out properly in October, or you can get it on the internet now, or you can go direct to Kanine, like I did. Evident Utensil is here too, and we’ve already established how great that is, right? So for those two, I’m in, and I’m listening to the rest of it, hoping to love it all. Pass me the eyeliner and something tartan, then.