Allan Jones: I’m told this is a work of genius... I must admit that it’s not a record I’ve particularly warmed to myself, or engaged with, but I’m open to being persuaded otherwise. Tony Wadsworth: Well, I have been involved in a record company role with earlier Gorillaz albums, but I have to say that I think this one is bloody brilliant. I’m always ready to be disappointed with people I’ve worked with in the past – and very often am! – but I think this is a masterpiece, I think it’s really ambitious, really clever. It’s got a message, an environmental message that comes from the heart. And it’s eclectic like no other album on this list, with perhaps the exception of Paul Weller – actually it’s a lot more eclectic than Paul’s. It’s cinematic, like the Arcade Fire album, it’s got some amazing vocalists giving great performances, and it’s got some brilliant tunes. I just don’t think you can ask for more from an album. Phil Manzanera: I’ve never been interested in the visual side of Gorillaz, I just listened to this as a record, and to me it’s got musicality, it’s got great pop melodies. It’s a fantastic collaborative work, how Damon Allbarn has managed to link all these strange people together and come up with something that’s quite new, really. I was pleased by its sonic ambition, every aspect of the playing on it is really, really good. On the minus side, I would say that it kind of peters out after a while, but that’s the only minus. Overall, I think it works really well. Danny Kelly: I think it’s easy to be very cynical about Gorillaz, but it’s wrong to be cynical about them, because Damon Allbarn is a brilliant thing to have in the world. I don’t know if he’s a brilliant musician, but he’s a brilliant ringmaster. To bring all this stuff together in one place is fantastic. I didn’t like this as much as I liked Demon Days, and I wonder if that’s because it’s more of the same or if I think it’s possible to over-loaded with amazing stuff. You’ve just got used to the fact that Damon’s got Mark E Smith to do his hilarious bit of “Glitter Freeze” – of all the words you might have got him to say, “which way is north?” is just brilliant, unbelievable – when Bobby Womack appears out of nowhere. I liked the record a great deal, I don’t quite love it, because I think it’s too tricksy in the end. But Damon is to be encouraged in all his endeavours, and if he doesn’t win today I want you, Allan, as the editor of Uncut, to write him a personal letter apologising for him not winning. People who liked the last album will like this one a lot. It’s a fine record, but it’s not the record of the year. Hayden Thorpe: I’m definitely a child of Britpop, and Damon, Noel Gallagher and Jarvis Cocker were my early heroes, and out of those three Damon’s the one I really admire. He’s brushed himself down and survived it, and he’s not afraid of doing something different. He’s not stuck to character in the way the others maybe have. It’s great that he has clout, commercially and financially, to put together any kind of record he wants to do. I was really heartened that this is a commercial record but it’s not been dumbed down for anyone, which in itself must have been quite challenging. Yes, it’s a cartoon band, but it’s larger than life in a great way, a great collage of sounds thrown together. Sometimes I struggle with how it hangs together because it’s such an amalgam on sounds, that would be my only criticism, but it definitely should be admired. I do like the way he allows his guests the freedom to be bigger extensions of themselves, which is a hard thing to do when you’ve got characters like Mark E Smith or Snopp Dogg. Tony: Damon is the least cynical musician or frontperson that I’ve ever worked with. He lives and breathes his music, it’s very important to him. Mark Cooper: Well, he’s Napoleon, isn’t he? I admire Damon enormously. I think a he’s difficult, obtuse, generous, mean, wonderful maverick. It’s great that somebody can make a journey with a four-piece band and then go on and transcend that. Having done so well with Blur, he’s asked himself how can he recreate a different universe, how can he be free? And I think there’s great freedom in this record. Having said that, I get the impression that people here admire this record slightly more than they love it, which I think is interesting. Maybe because it’s two records, in a way; the hip-hop stylings are great, I think, really good fun, but I think what Damon does really, really well is write great melancholy ballads. Probably, sadly, it’s what the British have always been really good at, I think it’s one of our great exports. That’s what we sell: depression. I’m thinking in particular of “On Melancholy Hill” on this record, it’s from the same strand as the best songs he did with The Good, The Bad & The Queen, or Blur songs like “The Universal”. To me, it’s those type of songs here that dominate, because they’re where I hear Damon the most. Allan: I know what you mean, they make me want to hear a whole album of that kind of thing, which I don’t think would be any less ambitious, but I would probably prefer it. Mark: On the other hand, I like the sprawling, Napoleon-like aspects of the album, the way Damon brings all this elements together, I think there’s no greater track this year than “Stylo”. I think the way he slightly confused people at Glastonbury, and on this record, is that there’s arguably not enough to hang on to. It’s so diverse, it does loads of things and ultimately perhaps that’s where admire rather than love suggestion comes in to play. At the end of the day, this record should have seized the world’s imagination and I don’t think it has, I don’t think it’s captured a moment as strongly as Demon Days did. Danny: I think maybe there’s too much possibility in this record, and maybe not enough delivery. Allan: Yeah, it’s terrible in a way to criticise a record for its ambition, but maybe the problem is that it runs away with itself at times. Mark: It’s fearless, though, and that’s what a lot of people will love about it.

A couple of weeks ago on his blog, Ethan Miller announced that, after two years of pre-production for an album with Rick Rubin, Howlin Rain would be releasing a new EP to coincide with their forthcoming European tour. “The Good Life” came out online last week, led off by the title track, an organ-heavy thudder whose excellence was not, oddly, undermined by its vague resemblance to The Dead Weather. They had a crack at “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp”, too, a pretty brave effort under the circumstances. At the London show last night, though, the EP doesn’t seem to be available, and “The Good Life” doesn’t make it onto the setlist. It’s as if the whole thing was borne of a desperate desire to get some music out, and that the real focus, the real work, remains that long-gestating third album. As a consequence, Howlin Rain only play three old songs: “Dancers At The End Of Time”, “Lord Have Mercy” (slightly misfiring tempo change, as ever) and a fantastic closing jam on “Calling Lightning Part Two”. For the rest, Miller rolls out a bunch of excellent new songs, many with a heavier than ever emphasis on Joel Robinow’s keyboards. Robinow is the only survivor from the last Howlin Rain iteration; now, Miller is backed by a limber, superior rhythm section. It’s Robinow who catches the eye, though – a little Brian Auger, a little early Jon Lord, a whole lot of Mark Stein from Vanilla Fudge, and a decent singer, too. Up against this, Miller seems more restrained than before, so that his own voice feels more controlled; he doesn’t seem to be shredding his larynx at the climax of each song. His songwriting, though, continues to evolve in jazzy, dynamic new ways, and the general strength and intuition of his new band only help. Consequently, the highlight of their first UK show in two years is a lengthy new track with Robinow on twin lead guitar, a blasting, intricate beast with deep affiliations to The Allman Brothers Band. It would be nice if I could write as forensically about Wooden Shjips, headlining here, but their evolution is not so pointed. Songs change – “We Ask You To Ride” is fuller and more oceanic than I’ve ever heard it before – but the aesthetic, that bouncing, endless droneride, remains reassuringly constant. What’s really striking this time, though, is how complete and insulated their soundworld is now: they’re so much of themselves that the kneejerk references to Spacemen 3, Neu!, The Doors and so on seem relatively irrelevant. Not that the Relentless Garage is the O2 or anything, but they have a presence, a grandeur, as well; a sense that their subterranean music is expanding outwards without losing any of its countercultural potency. What’s interesting, too, is how sharing a bill with Ripley’s other band, Moon Duo, shifts attention away from his consistently transporting guitar solos, and towards the dogged brilliance of his rhythm section. Once again, it crosses my mind what on earth these players did before they formed Wooden Shjips. If anyone has any details, I’d be fascinated to find out.

Part Six of the transcripts from the Uncut Music Award 2010 judging sessions. Today, we reach The Gaslight Anthem... Allan Jones: I think before Neil Young put out Le Noise, this was the album I’d been playing most this year. When we first heard them at Uncut there was a feeling that their influences were just too blatant to be taken seriously, but I really liked the last album and I like this one even more. It’s a very exciting rock record, I think the songs are really great, they’re very concise – I think the longest track is about four-and-a-half minutes. It’s the sort of record you can put on any time anywhere and it’ll make you feel good. Just one of my favourite records this year. Whether that merits it being on this list, or ending up anywhere near the top I don’t know. Am I going mad? Mark Cooper: I think they’re a great old-school New Jersey band, even though they themselves are quite young. There’s a great American highway surge in their records, and very few people make records that direct anymore, they have a Bruce-ness, a Born To Run-ness, if you will. But much in the way that The Coral embrace the '60s, The Gaslight Anthem embrace the American highway in a style that purports to be contemporary but I’m not so sure that it is. I’m not sure if it’s just a highway of the imagination. Clearly, their childhood was a childhood growing up on Bruce, but for me that ultimately holds them back. I love all the reference points, I think like The Coral they truly believe in what they’re doing and are sincere in their vocabularly, although in a way it’s someone else’s vocabulary. And, ultimately, I don’t think that’s enough. Tony Wadsworth: Yeah, I’m with Mark on that. I would say that there are elements of Van Morrison and Mink DeVille in there as well, but there’s a couple of tracks on this that sound that they were specifically written to be hits and I do find that uncomfortable. I’d like to think of them as a genuine hard-working New Jersey band, but the title track in particular sounds to me like a contrived shot at gettting a hit single, and was written only for that purpose. It’s actually an OK song, but it just didn’t ring as true as it might have done. So, yeah, basically not one of my favourites on this list. Phil Manzanera: I always get the impression that there’s hundreds of bands like this in America, but maybe there’s not. I worry that they’ve tied their colours to the Springsteen mast too tightly, because the main difference is that Bruce has The E Street Band. There’s a lot more context to what Springsteen does and it’s much more musically interesting. Maybe some of these tunes are a bit more commercial than Springsteen’s, but they’ve got to come up with that X factor Bruce brings to his music. There are any number of American bands heading towards stadiums with good drummers and good guitarists, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re doing anything special. Danny Kelly: Allan, you’re not going mad, it’s actually a great rock record. People are living in a world where their influences are crushing them. That could have gone one of two ways, and I would have had no problem with this band, on their third album, saying ‘Fuck the lot of you, we’re going to remake Born To Run’. Instead, what they did was make the not-Born To Run. They have compacted themselves. There is a solidity where leaves, over time, become coal which then becomes diamonds, and that’s what’s happened on this LP. It’s 34 minutes long, they’ve not allowed themselves any solos, they’ve not allowed themselves any arrangements, except for the strings in the last song [“We Did It When We Were Young”], and I think in that horrible attempt to escape from their straitjacket they’ve actually made a really brilliant record. And, of course, that’s going to drive people mad, because it’s even more like Springsteen in its attempts to try not to be. I suppose the question to ask here is what the fuck does anyone expect them to do? This is where they’ve arrived, musically, and I would expect people to dislike this record for the very reasons you and I like it, Allan. It made me wish I was 17 again and had never heard Born To Run. But I also like the fact that one different track is right at the end, as if to say ‘we could do something different if we wanted to...’. Maybe they should have spread it out over a double album, done some of the songs as seven-minute things and let them breathe. There’s no reason to think that this is the best album on this list, but I really loved it. Hayden Thorpe: I found it really boring. I really struggled with it, to be honest. I know their sound guy really well, and I know that the band themselves are happy to be Bruce’s godson band, as it were, but I found the production really cynical, too radio-friendly, like they’re trying to hard to have a hit. I think Phil’s right, in that there’s probably at least another hundred bands on the circuit doing the same thing. I think to our anglicised ears, and I’m guilty of this myself, we’re a bit envious of it, for its perpetuation of Bruce Springsteen’s myths about New Jersey. That’s what I think we’re buying in to, or at least it’s what I’m buying in to, but I’m a lot younger than every one here. Sorry! But I just think that if you’ve already heard Born To Run and you love it, then why would you ever need this record? It doesn’t pack even half of the punch that Bruce does. Danny: I don’t agree with you about the production, I think it’s totally uncynical. If they were being cynical they would have let it breathe. Whether they’re playing as well as The E Street Band – and I suspect you’re right, Phil, that they’re not – but I love that all that sound is crushed into these tiny, tiny spaces. There’s probably much too much going on in places, but that’s OK in my book. Tony: I think they’re trying to do Darkness On The Edge Of Town, actually. Mark: But I feel they’re not trying to do Born To Run or Darkness On The Edge Of Town, they’re not challenging themselves in that way at all, although there is maybe an agenda that they don’t quite realise themselves. Yet, I feel that the Beach House and Coral records sound more innocent. They all have those retro influences, but this retro world is also the way of radio in America, and I think The Gaslight Anthem are more a part of that than they would ever care to admit.

Among other things I’ve failed to blog about this year, it occurs to me I’ve been particluarly slack on the subject of garage rock. A quick attempt to make amends today, with three of my favourites, before I get round to putting together a 2010 chart of sorts. I’ve struggled a bit with previous Ty Segall releases I’ve come across, but his “Melted” album is terrific. Segall goes for the scuzzier, psychedelically damaged lo-fi end of the garage spectrum, and has strong connections with Sic Alps and Thee Oh Sees (the latter’s 2010 album “Warm Slime” is another good one, incidentally). If “Melted” reminds me of anyone, though (contemporary, I should say: “Sad Fuzz” is pretty intensively moptop, for a start), it’s Kurt Vile: fraught, dissolute, mischievous, and capable of some fierce tunes that cut like a knife through the racket. In contrast, “Strychnine Dandelion” by The Parting Gifts is more orthodox, if no less spirited. When I alluded to this on a playlist blog a while back, I was justifiably reprimanded by one of the band for failing to mention her, so I should say this time that The Parting Gifts are a supergroup, of sorts, in this world, featuring as they do Coco Hames from The Ettes and Greg Cartwright from, among other things, The Reigning Sound, plus Patrick Keeler (Raconteurs, Greenhornes) and Dan Auerbach (Black Keys). A lot to go on here, but plenty here would work well on the last great Reigning Sound album, especially when Cartwright takes the lead and hits that twanging southern garage soul vibe on the likes of “Hanna” and “My Baby Tonight”. The Spectorish stuff fronted by Ames is nice, too, though, especially a take on “Sleepy City”, a great bit of Stones marginalia. The Fresh And Onlys’ “Play It Strange” is closer in vibe to Ty Segall, but there’s something janglier about them, a sense of West Coast classicism running through a bunch of these songs that makes the album worth filing near Darker My Love’s excellent “Alive As You Are” from earlier this year. Really nice, though somewhat in keeping with the band (and the scene they’re a part of) that they keep their best two 2010 songs, “Impending Doom” and “Double Vision” for an entirely separate seven-inch.

Today, the Uncut Music Award judges consider Deer Tick's "Black Dirt Sessions"... Allan Jones: It’s very encouraging to see that they’ve got this far. When I first saw the 25-album long list I thought they’d be rank outsiders. Chris Difford was very enamoured of this, and you were also, Mark. Mark Cooper: To be honest, this was the big discovery for me in terms of this award. I hadn’t heard them before, although somebody sent me the record when it first came out and I didn’t get round to listening to it, which I regret. It blew me away, this record, I loved it. I thought, ‘Oh god, what a strong and original voice’. I suppose in some ways they have lots of trad Dylanesque elements, and I just believed right from the start in the songwriting, and in the sense of the man. I think “Goodbye, Dear Friend” is one of the best songs I’ve heard in ages. You just believe that song, you’re at the funeral with him. I like the ambition of the record, although I suspect some people will find his [John McCauley] voice grating because it has a harsh grain to it, but I love it. I’m very glad to be part of this panel, if only because it introduced me to something very special that would otherwise have passed me by. Allan: By the time it gets to “Christ Jesus” McCauley lets his voice go completely, I mean that could have been on the second side of the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album, it’s a totally unfettered vocal. I can imagine people being quite scared of it, actually, it gets very scary live. Mark: There’s real emotional meat on the record, I think. Tony Wadsworth: Well, I’m one of those people who didn’t like his voice particularly. I think the songwriting is great, and it was a discovery for me too, because I hadn’t previously heard any of their stuff. I loved “Goodbye, Dear Friend”, I thought “20 Miles” was really good, but his voice is what stops me from loving it. Also, a lot of the time I thought, musically, we’ve been here before. There’s one song where what is essential the “Sympathy For The Devil” guitar solo kicks off – and I didn’t that was especially great the first time round, to be honest. I think there are people in this sphere of music who do this sort of thing so much better, and I’m not just thinking of Dylan or the Stones, I’m thinking of more up-to-date artists like The Jayhawks. But at the end of the day, it is the voice that just doesn’t do it for me. Phil Manzanera: Certainly, I’d never heard them before, and I was quite surprised because it wasn’t what I was expecting. For some reason, I was expecting to hear something closer to hard rock. I liked the first track, but as the album progressed I found his voice a bit too gruff for my own tastes. I did persevere, and I think the record probably repays several visits, but on first listen I got distracted about two-thirds of the way through, it just wasn’t grabbing me enough. Danny Kelly: I can totally buy into how devoted to the music the artist is; you can hear it in the songwriting, there are times when he could go for the easy option but he doesn’t. That’s to be commended, but I also have to go along with things that have been said earlier, in that the songs, or the music around the songs, have to be remarkably better than they are to sustain that voice over the whole length of the LP. The things being said in the songs would have to be more powerful and more direct for me to overlook the voice in which they were being said, because I too did find it a bit grating. I gotta be honest, I found it a bit samey as well. I don’t doubt for one minute that there will be some people who find the downcast-ness of it really fascinating, and I don’t know the back story of John McCauley to help me in that respect. I couldn’t say that I liked it very much. Hayden Thorpe: I thought it was a really endearing record, I like the fact that John is not afraid of putting his character across without editing himself in any way, even if it is a bit confrontational and difficult to stomach at times. I think the lexicon he uses is incredible, the way he uses the rhymes and argot of the southern states of America, that really pushed my buttons. As has already been mentioned, that one song “Goodbye, Dear Friend” is amazing. It is what it is, at the end of the day, it’s quite lo-fi, very basic in how it was recorded. If you read the lyrics in the CD booklet while you’re listening to the songs you’ll notice that they don’t always correspond, which gives the record a spontaneous feel. It probably isn’t quite visionary enough to be right up there and win this award, but for what it is it’s a really well-made and good-intentioned record.

A few months ago, I managed to smuggle a track by Oneohtrix Point Never onto an Uncut CD; a David Bowie-themed compilation of vaguely futuristic music. Oneohtrix is the project of a guy based in New York called Daniel Lopatin, who reconfigures various kosmische tropes with some ‘80s sci-fi vibes and comes up with a kind of New Age music for underground noise fans. “Physical Memory”, the track on the Uncut CD, is pretty majestic: looming interstellar ambience taken from a 2009 compilation of rare Oneohtrix releases, "Rifts". But while this sort of music has certainly been gaining some traction in the interim – both from electronica fans, and from hipper followers of the hazy bedroom scene known as chillwave – I didn’t anticipate Oneohtrix’s year to turn out in quite this way. Namely, with his 2010 album, “Returnal”, sitting happily in Uncut’s Top 20 Albums Of The Year. There are plenty of other audio cosmographers working in this sphere right now: off the top of my head, Arp, White Rainbow, Robert AA Lowe, Stellar Om Source, Mountains. But from the burst of granular noise that opens Returnal, it seems as if Lopatin has upped the ante. Returnal, essentially, feels like the point of entry into a hidden musical universe. Much of it consists of beatless, crystalline glides; ambience which, nevertheless, sounds more unnerving than restful. It’s not a stretch to suggest that Oneohtrix Point Never could work in the same way as Boards Of Canada did a decade ago; as eldritch comedown music, albeit more indebted to Tangerine Dream. There is, too, a pop song; “Returnal”’s title track, which Lopatin sings with an alien quaver that recalls Fever Ray. “Returnal” has already been re-imagined as a piano ballad, with the lead being taken by Antony Hegarty. The next time Bjork goes searching for new electronic talent to help her out, it’s hard to imagine she’ll look much further than Lopatin. For me, though, there’s another act on the scene who are even better than Oneohtrix. Emeralds are a trio from Cleveland who’ve racked up a frankly bewildering catalogue in the past few years, and who’ve inched fractionally closer to the mainstream in 2010 with the superb “Does It Look Like I’m Here”. This one has a lot of similarities with Lopatin’s work, but amps up the intensity somewhat thanks to a lot of Terry Rileyish ripples and the presence in the lineup of Mark McGuire, a freakout guitarist evidently keen on Manuel Gottsching (who’s playing in Glasgow, incidentally, on December 11). McGuire has a fiercely active solo career, too (this year’s “Living With Yourself” isn’t too far from post-rock; “Tidings/Amethyst Waves” is the best I’ve tracked down). A few Sundays back, Emeralds played a basement club on the City Of London’s edge, and effectively massacred most of my preconceptions about them. McGuire lunged back and forth in guitar hero ecstasies, while one of the two electronics operatives had his back to the audience and headbanged vigorously throughout. Occasionally, he’d turn round, grimace, and punch the air. This happened quite a lot during the spectacularly pummelling 20 minutes of “Genetic”, all turbo-Bach arpeggios and a treatment of psychedelia that verged on punkish. Instead of three serene New Age practitioners, Emeralds seemed to have become fierce rock marauders. “Does It Look Like I’m Here”, incidentally, should figure fairly high up in my personal albums of the year. If you’re interested, I’ll post a full list – as close to a Top 100 as I can stretch – in the next week or so.

Album Number Four on the Uncut Music Award 2010 shortlist. Here's what the judges said about The Coral's "Butterfly House"... Allan Jones: This was a favourite of both Bob Harris and Chris Difford, although neither of them is here to champion it, but I think you’re quite enthusiastic too, Danny. Danny Kelly: First of all, I want to make a confession, and that is that The Coral are my favourite group working today, and I say that fully in the knowledge that hardly anyone else likes them. They’ve been accused of making the same record over and over again, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I came to this on the back of thinking that their previous album, Roots & Echoes, was a brilliant record, my favourite of that particular year. It took me a little while longer to get to love Butterfly House, but I do love it. I mentioned earlier about the number of records on this list that were in some way linked to struggle. This band are struggling with the fact that they make these records, everyone tells them that they’re great, and then nothing happens for them. So what they’ve done on this record, what they’ve decided to do about the fact that they’re struggling, is to do nothing about it all. Well, that’s not strictly true, they’ve sort of added a folk element to their basic 60s template. I love the fact that something as arguably unfashionable as Simon & Garfunkel starts turning up in songs like “Roving Jewel” or “Walking In The Winter”. But ultimately there’s nothing really different about this record, it’s just another tremendous Coral record. If Bob was here he’d probably tell me that there are million things different about it, and I wish he was, but all I can say is that I think it’s a beautiful record. Phil Manzanera: The first track [“More Than A Lover”] is incredibly catchy, every time I put it on I’m convinced I’ve heard it before many years ago. That’s partly my problem with it; it’s a great production by John Leckie, great songwriting, I love the pastoral elements, but for me, having grown up listening to The Byrds and The Beatles, it just doesn’t have the same resonance. It’s beautifully done, it’s possibly near perfect, but it sounds too much like a period piece, and I’d rather listen to the real thing. It’s very difficult for me to praise these guys doing this kind of music, and I know that sounds terribly unfair. Tony Wadsworth: I’m sort of with Phil on this one. I think John Leckie has done a really good job, the Byrds influences, particularly Gene Clark, are writ large, but I would rather just listen to the originals. I don’t want to be too down on it, but I feel that other people have done this better previously and I don’t find it distinctive enough. Mark Cooper: I suppose the question is whether The Coral have done it better. I think The Coral live in a world of their own, admittedly it’s a world of the 60s but it’s a 60s that I particularly like. They remind me of The Small Faces around the time of “Itchycoo Park”, when bands were getting psychedelic but still writing three-minute pop songs, and they have a kind of jugband expansive feel about them. I think The Coral are very self-sufficient; they’ve been on our show Later... three or four times, and they never talk to anybody! They don’t give a fuck, and I love that about them. They turn up and they leave, they don’t really want to make friends, they just want to ‘do’ their world, and I think this record is like that. It’s very self-contained, very beautiful, very likeable, but I’m not sure that it’s the best Coral record. It’s perhaps one of the most succinct ones, though. Tony: My problem with it is that I didn’t get the impression there was any fun going on. Mark: Yeah, it’s a bit mournful. But I’m so glad they exist, I don’t think there are many other British groups like them, and I hope they keep going for a long time. I hope people do cherish them, I’m really glad this record is in the Top Eight because hopefully it will shine a bit of light on them. It’s hard for groups like them who’ve been dropped by a major label and have to try to pick themselves up again. Danny: The news from inside the camp is that the biggest change now that they’re no longer on a major is that they can no longer indulge the taste they developed for fresh lobster! I suspect that’s way off the menu these days. Hayden Thorpe: I admire them and find myself frustrated by them in equal measure. They approach what they do as an art, which is very admirable, they obviously work very hard at achieving their sound, but because it’s so accurate it’s almost pastiche, it’s almost a cartoon. The opening chord on the last song [“North Parade”] I think must be exactly the same as “A Hard Day’s Night”. Tony: It is; G6. Hayden: There’s a lot of moments like that, where the sound is very deliberate, very precise, but it’s just a bit too generic to really get my blood flowing. Mark: I’m not sure how contrived or academic they are about things, I get the feeling that this is just the world they live in. Allan: It’s like a sort of fantasy bubble for them; they’re focusing on a period time that they obviously didn’t live through themselves, but they’ve got a very vivid idea of what it was like. But there groups they remind me of less historically, like Shack, very powerful but not likely to get much further than where they already are. Phil: One of the biggest problems for an artist is that you have all these influences, and rather than just regurgitate them you have to bring something new to the party. You take those influences and you add a new dimension, or at least you ought to. If I was the producer I’d be saying to them, yes this is all very good but what’s new?