Buried Treasure

As Darren Price’s ‘Under the Flightpath’ landed on my desk, I was about to fly away.

Somewhere, out there in the infinite multiverse, is a parallel reality version of Duran Duran.

An album can be revelatory in any number of ways. Perhaps it arrives at the right time in your life to be particularly resonant, or it might reveal a whole area of music you didn’t realise existed.

The artists that live on the fringes, the forward (or sideways) thinkers, have always drawn me in. This fascination really kicked in at university when, in the early 2000s, I presented a radio show with Erotic Volvo of Birmingham wrong-pop band Misty’s Big Adventure. As a kind of musicologist of the weird, his selections were never predictable and often a revelation.

Though Hefner survive in the collective consciousness as the exemplar of an indie guitar outfit, the band deployed vintage synths and drum machines on later recordings. Which means that this, The French’s ‘Local Information’, isn’t quite the without-precedent one-off it might first appear.

Back in the olden days, many music journalists had a nice sideline penning biogs, frothy one-pagers extolling the virtues of a major label’s next big thing. The money was more than you’d earn writing a cover feature, so understandably competition was fierce.

Tumbling into YouTube holes can be a risky business. One minute you’re learning about dark matter or the Italian Futurists, the next you’re watching a pseudo Professor Denzil Dexter explain how the moon is, in fact, hollow and made out of toilet roll tubes

There’s beauty in the noise. Or is it beauty in the nanosecond as the noise stops?

It’s 1996, Britpop is all-seeing and Rough Trade couldn’t give a hoot.

The problem with any music industry buzz is the knowledge that the buzz quickly fades and the act stagnates and often dies.