Bob Fischer

Blancmange have released some terrific albums in recent years – and ‘Private View’ is up there with their very best. In a hugely entertaining and highly revealing interview, frontman Neil Arthur gives the inside story on the band’s latest record and also talks art, swimming, dead men’s suits, recycling, smudged bindis, inflatable whales, luck, love, loss… and how everything is connected

She has played synthpop with Saloon and folk rock with The Left Outsides, but Alison Cotton‘s new solo album enters more experimental territory, evoking the beautifully bleak heritage of her native North East

Take I Monster’s electronic veteran Dean Honer, gradually introduce soulful folkie Kevin Pearce, and heat gently over a Bunsen burner. The result? The Sound Of Science – a successful bonding and a new album of scientific delights

Adam Cresswell is Rodney Cromwell. Previously, he’s been Arthur from Arthur And Martha, a founder member of Saloon, and a man whose life was changed by a shattered jar of pickled onions

There’s no one quite like Keith Seatman. His new album, ‘Sad Old Tatty Bunting’, is a psychedelic joyride through a parallel universe, a dreamlike England full of alchemists and scarecrows and gated communities guarded by gnomes

Infused with the spirit of Woodstock and resolutely “bound to the mountains”, Midlake and Mercury Rev’s Jesse Chandler pays tribute to his late father on a second album as Pneumatic Tubes