I won’t lie to you. I feel cheated by Counting Crows. After literally minutes of half-drunk wavering over whether to leave the pub and pop to HMV to buy a copy of their highly rated...

For a moment in 1992 the indie press were all agog with the wonders of a country group. Signed to Heavenly, and labelmates to the likes of St Etienne and Flowered Up (the three acts...

I first became aware of Elliott Smith when he played the Shepherd's Bush Empire in 1998. Supporting up-and-coming cardigan wearers Belle & Sebastian he was almost inaudible, invisible. I really had no idea at the...

I love it when Britpop does moody. It’s like hearing a nun swear.

Select Magazine’s second best album of 1993 (pipped to the post by the exceedingly marvelous Giant Steps) was One Dove’s only album. You can blame record label politics for that....

How Dubstar seem to have fallen so far outside our collective consciousness I cannot explain. Disgraceful might have seemed like an uneven album at the time of its release, but its highs were surely memorable:...

In the wake of Portishead and the Bristol sound came a new wave of post-trip hop artists, expanding the genre into newer areas, whether it wanted to go there or not. Among their number were...

1995 was the year trip-hop truly broke, when Portishead won the Mercury Prize for the debut album Dummy. The album spawned three singles, “Numb”, “Sour Times”, and the Ike Turner sampling “Glory Box”. Others would...

An unlikely track to find on a free CD from Q Magazine, but that’s exactly where you could get hold of a copy of this track in late...

Moody Monday.

Curse you, Vic Reeves, you and your singing in the club style. Not because you’ve affected my very deep Tindersticks love (it’s gone too far and for too long to be sideswiped by anything so...

In what now seems like a fit of over-exuberance, at the time of its release I awarded Expecting to Fly the unofficial mantle of best new album, album of the year, the decade, ever and...

…at the link it’s easy.

For at least a year I only thought of Grant Lee Buffalo as a curiosity: I knew a handful of tracks from their debut album Fuzzy, but I was yet to be convinced of their...

Bender, when I’m upset, I write a song about it. Like when I wrote Devil’s Haircut I was feeling really… really… what’s that song about?

Perhaps mistaking The Frank and Walters for a one album novelty act, the world paid only a little attention to Grand Parade on its release in 1996. Three years on from the more playful Trains,...

Are we really going to film the whole video in the water?

By happy coincidence, we’re watching Conan again. Here he takes the opportunity to thank most of the band for their performance, sneaking up on and alarming Hope Sandoval in the process. Sandoval, after a typically...

And so to the headliners…

The introspective, minor key side of big synth. There’s a dreamy, spectral quality to the music; sounds creep in and out throughout, and trickster seems to have stolen part of the chord progression from the...