“Oh, that? It’s the B-side to the new Yo La Tengo single…”

Don’t you just love small independent record shops? You know the sort - you walk in to find the staff are busy flaunting their good taste and gleefully experimenting on their guinea-pig customers with some obscure new gem, just waiting to see if anyone comes up to the counter to ask what it is. Even better if they manage a sale. Over the years I must have ended up making at least a couple of purchases that way, though I couldn’t tell you which albums they were.

In Tempest (Birmingham) today, I’m not sure what it was - I cruelly denied the staff the satisfaction of telling me - but it sounded like Les Savy Fav gone REALLY spastic, the kind of music that would make Steve Albini cream his pants at twenty paces and, thankfully, a million miles from what you’d get in Virgin – sickly gloopy slush that oozes from the speakers and curdles in your ear. Like Dido.