Discovering great new music

One of the little pleasures of life for a music lover is the moment when you hear a new band for the first time and absolutely love everything about them. It's a pleasure made all the greater if you can manage to circumnavigate the usual hype, marketing and music-journo hyperbole and make the discovery all by yourself. There's a purity in the knowledge that your love of the music is completely honest and unswayed by fashion, personality, genre or bandwagons.

There was a time when such discoveries happened more often, when Indie was really independent, and you could always find hidden gems on the playlists of John Peel, Andy Kershaw or the Evening Session. Now it seems every new band is preceded by a whirlwind of hype and marketing. Even the apparently word-of-mouth rise of the Arctic Monkeys via Myspace has since been revealed as a piece of expert marketing by the record label - seizing the opportunity of Web 2.0 some way in advance of the rest of the music industry.

I don't have a lot of time to listen to the radio or read the music press on a regular basis, so my own opportunities for coming across something new are a little diminished these days. However, it does mean I can avoid a lot of the background noise surrounding new bands and make my own decisions about what I like. Over the last few years, Later...with Jools Holland has proved invaluable in introducing me to some great new stuff. Last year, on the same edition of the show Hard-Fi had their first TV appearance (several months before their Stars of CCTV album was released), along with Arcade Fire. Both performances were storming and made me a devoted fan. Later... is back on BBC2 next Friday, 3rd November for what will hopefully be a decent run of programmes, after the last couple of runs which have been a bit short. Muse are on the first show, and after they wiped the floor with everyone else at Reading in the summer that should be one not to miss.


The Album Chart Show on Channel 4 is another place (one of the few remaining) to see brilliant live performances on TV, particularly from new bands. And it was tonight's show that led me to post this music-related blurb. There is a new 'best new band in Britain' and it is the Howling Bells. Their stonking performance of Setting Sun was fantastic - think PJ Harvey meets the Velvet Underground via Mazzy Star. Fucking Ace. Imagine my surprise when just an hour or so later their video turned up on MTV2. I guess they have been written about in the music press; there is obviously some weight of promotion behind them. I'm thankfully oblivious to all that but happy that I managed to catch them and add their eponymous debut album to my must-buy list for this weekend. Apparently the album is produced by Ken Nelson who has previously worked with Coldplay, but I won't let that put me off. I think they sounded better playing live than in their video anyway... :-)