Mount Florida ‘Arrived Phoenix’ (Matador, 2000)

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.

Few music discovery anecdotes start with “I was rugby tackled by a man in a cinema because he liked my T-shirt”, but discovering Lancashire oddballs Element starts like that for me.

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.

In Ananda Shankar’s relatively short lifetime, the Indian sitar player was never afraid to push boundaries.