Like The Eton Rifles, Sleep Well Tonight is a tale of dust-ups and differences; this time it's not class warfare as such, more the small-town mindset versus anything that dares to act different, think different,...

When I first heard Matt Berry had an album out it was from a commenter somewhere below the line on The Guardian’s web site. As it was a suggestion for one of the albums of...

Hello, hooray, what a nice day!

It’s appropriate enough that opening salvo of Franz Ferdinand’s fourth album is a found lyric, a moment of brilliance that isn’t quite matched by what follows. The words (“Come home - practically all is nearly...

Hello Basingstoke, hello HMV, hello listening post.

Some stirring Sunday nostalgia to savour courtesy of Public Service Broadcasting. Raiding the national archive for their War Room EP, here they rework a Ministry of Information and Ministry of Agriculture film encouraging the nation...

A beautiful live version of one of I Am Kloot’s many finely crafted vignettes.

2 for one Tuesday: today’s deal is on sumptuous Scottish indiepop 🙂

Something a little bit wonderful: the secret life of the shopping trolley, as brought to you by the video for Camera Obscura’s new single, “Break It To You Gently”.

Southampton’s finest?

The Buttercross, The Railway, Jewry Street... who'd have thought such locations as these would be immortalised in song? I mean, really. This is Winchester. Nothing much happens here apart from the Hat Fair and a...

And as a Friday Doves bonus, here they are at the electric proms performing Snowden and Winter Hill. I used to live near Winter Hill; it was a lovely place for a walk (not that...

Here’s Doves performing a very tidy acoustic version of Kingdom of Rust in front of the third largest steerable dish radio telescope in the world (aka the Lovell Telescope, but then you knew that already,...

Happy talking, talking happy talk… win yourself a cheap tray…

An obvious choice for today - after many years and near misses, this evening I’ll finally get to see Blur play live.

The lovely Patio Song, from the lovely Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, from their album Barafundle, named after a bay in south Wales. I was there last month, and guess what? It’s lovely.

Another day, another train journey, this time in the company of the latter day Syd Barrett: Robyn Hitchcock. Here, the Cambridge surrealist offers up a typically dreamy world, and the only lyric that I’m aware...

We start August’s playlist, naturally enough, with a journey home, and a sweet and tender song about making that journey. It’s the opening track from Elbow’s third and should-have-been-the-breakthrough album Leaders of the Free World....

Songs of home, songs about the UK, homecoming songs, after a month in which I spent some time with family and friends in the UK.

If the performance of this track from Orbital’s 2012 album Wonky at the 2012 Paralympics opening ceremony doesn’t touch you even in some small way, or give you the chills at least once then please...