The Old Normal

We venture out. As a whole family. The teenagers are a bit nervous: since the Covid-19 lockdown began to ease they've seen friends in parks and gardens but none of them have been to a built-up area, let alone go into a public building, move around in the same space as other people, sit down and eat and drink in a restaurant.

The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea has just opened up again after a long closure and we wanted to support our favourite local institution. Numbers are obviously limited so we booked online for a two-hour Sunday lunchtime slot. This gave us access to the exhibitions, the shops and the café.

When we arrive it's all very welcoming. We are asked to wear our masks in the gallery spaces and the shops but we do not have to as we move around the building or in the café. The café is where we head for first as the teenagers find it difficult to go more than two hours without food. The staff seem genuinely pleased to see us: these are their jobs and they're still here; how many jobs is the country destined to lose when the furlough scheme ends?

The food comes and the lime and coriander chicken is a hit with the carnivores; the black bean and beetroot falafels are a hit with me. The Guinness is even better: home drinking is ok but being out and having a pint feels like a liberation. We all admire an elderly gent sitting in the corner: he has a sea-facing table for one, iPad and earphones, pint of bitter. He alternates his gaze between the horizon and his screen and every so often lifts his mask to have a swig of beer. He looks inordinately happy to be out in the world. The middle teen asks me if that's what I aspire to in old age; damn right.

Afterwards we don our masks and wander through the Zadie Xa and Marc Bauer exhibitions and then the kids go off to walk along the seafront and search for ice cream. We mooch around the gift shop: my wife picks up some Eric Ravilious cards and I get a Derek Jarman book. I start to flick through the racks in the Music's Not Dead record shop, now located in the main foyer. I stay too long, obviously, and am left on my own. I buy a Fall album and find a rare Nico LP that I can justify the price of.

The two-hour slot comes to an end so I step outside into the afternoon to find the others. They are all relaxing on a wall eating 99s; the terrace bar is open and some people are soaking up the sun and the beer; a smattering of cyclists and dog walkers are parading on the promenade; this all feels (almost) like the old normal.

Saturday Fever

Saturday morning. The teenagers are still in bed, freed for the weekend from the surprising pressure of remote learning. Suffering from cabin fever, we think about going to the beach; but even though we can now, we don’t. Stay home. Stay alert. We stay home. We sit in the garden. We are lucky. The quiet of the missing planes heading for Gatwick is still a joy. We watch the jackdaws desperately clinging on to the birdfeeder to peck at a fat ball; the sparrows sit on the veg plot fence trying to find a way through to eat the young beetroot seedlings like they did last year; I must put a net over those gooseberries.

I make some more coffee. I am almost sick of coffee – but not quite. The radio – what would we do without radio – is playing Nick Cave. I wonder if Nick’s sitting in his garden wearing a three-piece suit; I like to think he is. The continual temptation to check the news has eased. I am past caring which government minister has revealed their ineptitude in the morning round of media appearances. Still people will vote for them, even with 40,000 dead. What would the toll need to be to stop them being elected? 50,000? 75,000? Vote for me and I promise to keep casual slaughter and immigration both below 100,000.

Power Tool Pete on the end is out; furlough has pushed him to the limit of his tether. There is no drill, mower, blower that he cannot deploy hourly in the relentless cause of maintaining a tiny terraced cottage and garden. Daughter has reported from her back-bedroom eyrie that he is instructing his ten-year-old son in the art of shed-building.

Back indoors, the excitable long-legged dog dances about in front of us, like a prancing show pony, in anticipation of a walk. We take him out. The little-legged dog has to stay home. He is eleven and feeling it; on the last lengthy walk, I had to carry him home for the last two miles. A saying kept popping into my head: there’s no point in keeping a dog and doing the walking for both of you - or something like that.

We have always walked the dogs along the local footpaths and fields, here. Even walking every day, we rarely saw another soul. When lockdown started, we kept coming across dogs and people we had never seen before. Where had they come from? Didn’t they walk their dogs in normal times? Today the paths are deserted again; they’ve all gone to the beach. Coming home we nod and smile to some of the neighbours we nod and smile to during the weekly Clap for Carers - even the ones who had a Vote Conservative placard up in December. You want to save the NHS? I’ll tell you how you can fucking save the NHS…

We eat and read and doze and drink through the afternoon; teenagers concoct ever more unlikely snack combinations to sustain the TikTok and Xbox activities. The temperature drops a few degrees and the smell of cooking meat wafts across the gardens. The young couple next-door-but-one have friends round for a barbecue. Is that..? No. From the other direction, Pete fires up his patio heater to compensate for the grounded aircraft. We head indoors for the evening and torture ourselves by listing the things we’ll do on a Saturday when this is all over: go to The Codfather in Hastings for fish ‘n’ chips; sit on the balcony of the De La Warr in Bexhill and buy records in Music’s Not Dead; wander through The Lanes in Brighton; go to a gig. The ordinary. We crave the ordinary. If we can just have the ordinary back we’ll never complain about anything again, we say. Except Pete and his one-man war on the environment and those bastards up the road who vote Tory.

Music Therapy

Friday evening, and after a hard week back at the chalkface, I was in need of a lift. With a few quid left over from the summer spending money and new albums out from Nick Cave, King Creosote and Pictish Trail, I headed down to Bexhill’s stellar record shop, Music’s Not Dead, for some – and I know it’s not a nice phrase - retail therapy. But as so often with Music’s Not Dead, you don’t just get to pick up the albums; there is always a warm welcome and sometimes you get to have some of the tracks played to you live by the artists themselves: music therapy.

Last night it was the turn of Isle of Eigg-based Johnny Lynch, AKA Pictish Trail and head honcho of the Lost Map record label, to perform in-store to promote his beautiful new album, Future Echoes. Supported on bass and keyboards by Suse from Lost Map band, Tuff Love, he delivered a short but diverse set, mostly from the album. The first song from Future Echoes was Until Now, a traditional and haunting number which highlighted Lynch’s voice at its tender best. We were also treated to Half-Life, the centrepiece of the album, with its nagging refrain of “we will always decay”, and the funky shuffle of Dead Connection which name-checked his label name throughout.

Using acoustic guitar, keyboards and backing tracks, Lynch is something of a sonic genius; it is this mixing of a folk sound with electronics that makes Pictish Trail stand out and, with the slow beats of Far Gone, he introduced us to Scottish hip hop, or ‘shop’ as he playfully branded it. I first saw Lynch at last year’s Green Man festival with Sweet Baboo, producer of Pictish Trail’s previous album Secret Soundz Vol. 2. They were something of a comedy duo on that sunny Sunday evening on the Walled Garden stage and Lynch was no different last night. His despair at the political climate in the wake of the EU referendum and his realisation, on seeing young people off their faces at Bestival, that he is not seventeen anymore had us laughing a lot.

It was a wonderful evening: ensconced in the shop, listening to great music and watching the surprised faces of passers-by in the twilight street outside. We got to have a quick chat with Johnny afterwards about the weather at Green Man, getting Sweet Baboo to come to Bexhill and his forthcoming Brighton gig with a full band. Then I was home in time to carry out my usual Friday night ritual: falling asleep on the sofa.

Pictish Trail play the Green Door Store, Brighton on Monday 10th October.

A Different View

Before appearing at this weekend’s End of the Road festival, former Fiery Furnaces frontwoman Eleanor Friedberger played a Music’s Not Dead promoted gig in the café bar at the De La Warr Pavilion last night. Over from the United States to promote her third solo album, this year’s New View, most of the set was drawn from this critically acclaimed album.

Recorded in upstate New York, New View is ostensibly a slice of 70s singer-songwriter soft-rock; however, it is an LP shot-through with strong melodies and infectious pop hooks, and this was particularly demonstrated last night on songs such as Because I Asked You and He Didn’t Mention His Mother. But what I really like about Friedberger – apart from her cool shoes and incredible voice - is her uncluttered guitar playing which gives the music a lo-fi slacker edge that makes it different from standard folk and Americana.

Despite being supported on tour by only two of the musicians who recorded the album, they are a comfortable and accomplished trio; at times songs effortlessly segued into each other and, for the uninitiated, it would have been hard to tell where one began and the other ended. The personal lyrics are mostly dense, past tense narratives and, on stand-out song Sweetest Girl – “sweet girl with a broken heart, stop crying so I won’t start” – heart-breaking.

There was also a version of the Fiery Furnaces’ Evergreen and, on the theme of colour, Does Turquoise Work? from the new album was put to the audience for their opinion (personally I thought no, but it was a split decision). Friedberger recommended the video for the latter song, a piece of animation by bassist Jonathan Rosen, and I do too. You can watch it here.

Golden Songs

When Ryley Walker came over from the United States two years ago to play at record store and gig promoters Music's Not Dead's third anniversary celebration in Bexhill, the halfwit in me meant I did not go. Only having heard of him fleetingly when his debut album, All Kinds of You, had come out a few months earlier, I passed up the chance to see the Chicago-based musician for a fiver at the modest Albatross Club on the seafront on the grounds that Bexhill was about to host relatively expensive appearances by British Sea Power and Johnnies, Marr and Lydon. With hindsight, it was clearly my loss.

Last year, Walker's soulful bluesy folk - music that seems to draw most comparisons with Tim Buckley and onetime Hastings resident John Martyn - began to attract more attention. Second album, Primrose Hill, garnered glowing reviews and featured in many end-of-year best album lists, with Mojo praising his "wild complexities of sweet melody and song" and comparing his guitar playing to Bert Jansch. And now, as if to compound the Pentangle dimension to his sound, Walker has been touring with that band's legendary double bassist and sometime John Martyn collaborator, Danny Thompson.

There was no Thompson at Hastings' cathedral-like St. Mary in the Castle last night but this did not detract from the quality of Walker's performance. With the Norwegian duo of Julius Lind on electric bass and Stale Solberg on drums, the trio showed that Walker has quickly moved on from last year, with the bulk of the set made up of songs from forthcoming album, Golden Sings That Have Been Sung. And the songs were golden: highlights included The Halfwit in Me ("about being a dummy in Chicago"), The Roundabout and Sullen Mind. Walker's acoustic guitar shimmered and soared and his freeform interplay with Solberg's percussive idiosyncrasies was joyful.

Naturally funny and engaging, Walker was effusive between songs and expressed his love of seaside towns, drinking and eating fish 'n' chips but said that he fears violence from seagulls more than almost anything else in the world. There is a sense that he enjoys being permanently on the road and when he (sort of) name checked Music's Not Dead ("Music Stays") he asked where the late bar was. Finishing with a stellar version of Primrose Green, there was just time for one quick encore before the drinking could begin in earnest.

Earlier, Brighton-based Holly Macve had played a short set of haunting songs accompanying herself on guitar. Recently signed to Bella Union, I saw the 21-year-old support John Grant last year and was struck by her mesmeric and ethereal voice - a real talent destined for great things.

Tomorrow the World

The last time that Ben Watt was in Bexhill-on-Sea was for an in-store performance at the Music's Not Dead record shop to promote his 2014 album, Hendra. So impressed must he have been with people and place that day, that he returned to Bexhill last night to open the tour for his follow-up album, Fever Dream, with a Music's Not Dead-promoted gig at the De La Warr Pavilion. Watt says that he has had his arm twisted by shop proprietor, Del, into starting his world tour here and his band’s next stops will be London and Tokyo. Such is the bathetic life of international musicians: today Bexhill, tomorrow the world.

Although Bexhill is getting used to visits from big names these days - John Lydon's Public Image a few months ago, Tom Verlaine's Television soon – we are not too spoilt to be thrilled that Watt has Bernard Butler in tow as part of his band, along with sometime Everything But The Girl drummer Martin Ditcham and Aussie jazz bassist, Rex Horan. This is the band that recorded the new album and they sound like a tight unit from the off. The interplay between Watt and Butler’s guitars is a delight and Horan, mostly playing upright bass, underpins their folk/jazz/rock sound perfectly.

Opening with Bricks and Wood from Fever Dream, the new album is complemented with regular double backs into Hendra: Young Man’s Game and Golden Ratio follow before Faces of My Friends and the excellent Between Two Fires provide an indication of how good Watt’s new songs are. Having had a 30-year break in solo activity after his debut North Marine Drive in 1983, Watt has now produced two albums in three years. Explaining this, he recently said, "I felt compelled to write more...I feel I have somehow tapped into a nucleus of myself again lately."

The lively Nathaniel, one of my favourites of the 2014 crop of songs, then ushers-in recent single Gradually, a tender meditation on love growing apart slowly over time, with its desperate refrain of “barely getting through”. After more new material, there are two of the most delicate songs from Hendra – the title track and The Levels - that deal with bereavement after the loss of Watt’s sister.

The set builds to a close with a pair of older songs – 25th December, from Everything But The Girl’s Amplified Heart album, and the beautiful Some Things Don’t Matter from North Marine Drive – before finishing with Fever Dream. On the new album, the title track has a contribution from Hiss Golden Messenger's M.C. Taylor and one of the encores, New Year of Grace, features a Marissa Nadler vocal. The second encore, and final song of an exceptional night, is the piano-led Forget with the pertinent line, “the Sussex Downs after rainfall is as lovely as it gets.” How could Tokyo compete with that?

Fever Dreams is released on 8 April 2016 on Unmade Road.

Coast to Coast

At the De La Warr Pavilion last night, on a mild but typically breezy winter evening, the air of the eastern seaboard of the British Isles washed in to meet the southern coast of England. Record shop and music promoters, Music’s Not Dead, treated Bexhill to their final gig of the year with Fife’s James Yorkston, and his moving modern folk and self-deprecating anecdotes, supported by Lincolnshire’s Elle Osborne and her more traditional songs.

Osborne and Yorkston are both products of collectives: Osborne is part of the Nest Collective, a London-based network promoting musicians and events formed in response to the resurgence in folk music in the early part of the 21st century. Yorkston was a one-time member of the Fence Collective, the name given to musicians who were associated with Fence Records, an independent record label based in the coastal town of Anstruther and Cellardyke. A stellar roster of musicians were connected to Fence: KT Tunstall, Rozi Plain, The Pictish Trail and King Creosote who, in his more prosaic identity of Kenny Anderson, founded the label in 1997.

Fence Records no longer exists, but many of the acts can be found on other independent labels, primarily Lost Map and Domino. It is Domino Records that have released most of Yorkston’s albums and caused him to wear his “funky dude jumper”, last night. So named by his youngest child, it chimed with an early meeting Yorkston had with a Domino exec who wrote down a single word on her pad: “funky.” When he saw “Domino x 4” on last night’s guest list (they weren’t there), he felt there was only one garment to wear.

If that anecdote seems digressive, it is because it is typical of Yorkston’s rambling between-songs stories. There are tales of agoraphobia, recurring smoke alarms and a farcical episode, involving a painted-shut window and a pigeon in a Birmingham hotel room, that is worthy of inclusion in Lucky Jim. It almost seems as if there are as many stories as songs; but when he is singing, it is with all the poignancy and tenderness of the music I have been listening to for the past year on 2014’s The Cellardyke Recording and Wassailing Society album.

The beautiful Broken Wave (A Blues For Doogie), about the death of a friend and musician, is followed by Fellow Man, a song that Yorkston says began as advice to his son - “my fear is I may transfer my fears to you” - but ended up somewhere else - “I’m full of love for my fellow man.” Yorkston says that he would like to write songs about the terrible mess of the world but feels that others seem to do it so much better. As an example, he then performs a heartrending version of Eric Bogle’s anti-war ballad, The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.

Earlier in the evening, Elle Osborne had opened her set with an arrangement of another heart-breaking song, the traditional ballad, Annachie Gordon. Osborne was born to the folk tradition: her ancestors were fishing folk from Yorkshire and Suffolk who latterly congregated on Humberside and, when the fishing industry declined in the 1970s, came ashore and became folk singers. She taught herself to play the fiddle, growing up on Lincolnshire’s North Sea coast steeped in folk music. Everything sung by the people is folk music, she told us - football chants, hymns, carols – and, as if to underline the point, she sang a festive folk song, In The Bleak Midwinter, which the audience joined in with.

Three-Song Wonders

When I saw the charming and disarming Wave Pictures in Bexhill last summer, they had finished recording their most recent album, at Billy Childish’s studio in Kent, only a few days earlier. Just one of the songs that lead vocalist and guitarist David Tattersall co-wrote with Childish for the album was played that night but, a year on, and with the album released earlier this year to critical acclaim, a trio of those tracks formed the centrepiece of their set at the Underground Theatre in Eastbourne last night.

Working with Childish has given the band’s songs a garage rock edge and, having played the provocative and raucous Pea Green Coat – “Everybody in the station wore black/And then there was you in your pea green coat” – requests from the crowd for The Fire Alarm are rebuffed with typically self-deprecating humour. “We can’t play those two back-to-back,” Tattersall explains, “because then you’ll realise they are the same tune - essentially, we only have about three songs.” None of which is true, but they launch into the album’s title track, instead, before completing the run of songs from Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon with The Fire Alarm, safely distanced from its ‘doppelganger’.

As well as the flamingo, other avian life is present: from 2012’s delicious Long Black Cars album, both Stay Here And Take Care Of The Chickens and Seagulls are performed; and The Wave Pictures’ recurring motif of the sea features on Blue Harbour, from Beer In The Breakers, with the wonderful lyric, “let my eyes slip away/ toward the coast around the pier/ all the things that brought me here”. Bassist Franic Rozycki’s phrasing in the song’s run-out is also a delight.

Drummer Johnny Helm demonstrates the power of his voice when takes the vocals on Atlanta, from 2013’s City Forgiveness, and again later in the set when they play an old song, Sleepy Eye, from 2005’s Hawaiian Open Mic Night album. We are offered the democratic choice of Helm singing that or Now You Are Pregnant, another old song, but the crowd opt for the former. Then there is more audience participation as we are given the tricky task of singing the chorus to Come On Daniel (“come on Daniel!”), and Daniel-time is completed with the obligatory Daniel Johnston cover, this time, I Killed The Monster.

Jointly promoted by excellent local record stores, Bexhill’s Music’s Not Dead and Eastbourne’s Pebble Records, this superlative gig is brought to a close with two numbers from City Forgiveness: the final song of the set is Lisbon, with lyrics - “It was one of those days/ the dead were digging upwards through the earth” - that perfectly demonstrate Tattersall’s gift for marrying the prosaic and the absurd; and the encore is The Woods, a frantic Velvets-style workout that crackles with intimate electricity. There is only a month to go until the Green Man Festival where I will see The Wave Pictures again. But I can barely wait.

Vinyl Reckoning

Demand for new music on vinyl is on the increase: it has been steadily rising over recent years and sales are now back to their 1997 level, helped in part by April’s annual Record Store Day, when special vinyl releases by bands are much sought after. There may have been over a million vinyl sales last year but it still only accounts for 2% of the music market. Whoever the buyers are, it is still a niche area: I am sure there are some diehards who have never stopped buying vinyl and others who have returned to it; and there are undoubtedly younger music fans, raised on digital and not having known music in a physical form, who are responding to the retro appeal of records and turntables.

Even though I still listen to vinyl, I am not part of this new revolution. The sad pedant in me likes to keep my music collection compartmentalised: I have a strict line in the sand for when vinyl ended. I resisted the CD revolution of the mid-1980s and persisted with records until the early 90s when they became an increasingly marginalised format. The difficulty of finding new releases on vinyl made me finally relent. The last two vinyl albums in my chronologically arranged collection are The End of the Surrey People by Vic Godard and Sabresonic by the Sabres of Paradise. This dates my vinyl surrender to 1993 - when I made the switch to cassettes. This was just bloody-mindedness on my part and clearly did not last long as the first CD I bought was Dummy by Portishead, released in 1994. And it didn’t help that I had most of the cassettes stolen when my car got nicked. So, I have a strict format divide when buying music: anything released in 1993, or earlier, I have to buy on vinyl; anything released in 1994, or later has to be on CD.

Having been very briefly tempted by the digital age, I have chosen to shun iTunes and Spotify and I buy all my new music on CD from the wonderful Music's Not Dead shop in Bexhill; but I have never stopped trawling through the racks of charity shops and - increasingly rarely - second-hand record establishments to fill in those pre-94 gaps. Whether through sentimentality or regret, I have spent a reasonable amount of time over the last fifteen years hunting down a mental list of vinyl albums that I never bought at the time or, more usually, that I had but they fell from my clutches - either stolen, lost or sold.

When I was a young person, albums were a fluid currency, a commodity to be pawned: if you needed a few quid quickly, second-hand record shops, where you could sell a couple of albums, were legion. There were many gigs that I attended in the 70s and 80s that were funded by the proceeds of hastily sold albums. More often than not, I would pick up another second-hand copy a few weeks later; but some slipped through the net and over recent years I rectified this when I stumbled across copies of albums such as Raw Power, The Image Has Cracked and Soul Mining. The list is a lot shorter now but it still contains the first Roxy Music album, the New York Doll's Too Much Too Soon, Two Sevens Clash by Culture (how many levels of idiocy was I operating on the day I sold that one?) and The Pogues' Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. I am sure I could buy these over the internet at a click but that's not the point. It would deprive me of going to places like The Vinyl Frontier in Eastbourne.

Recently relocated from the Old Town area to the Little Chelsea quarter of Eastbourne, The Vinyl Frontier specialises in new, used and rare vinyl. In spacious and light-filled premises with a cafe area at the back, the shop boasts a large stock of used vinyl for the dedicated browswer. With rare time to spare before collecting the kids from sporting activities, I spent a glorious half an hour on Saturday morning rack-flicking. There was nothing from my mental list but I was tempted by Elvis Costello's My Aim is True, an LP I never bought at the time on the grounds that he wasn't "punk enough". That was until I saw a copy of Eden, Everything But The Girl's sumptuous debut album. I recalled playing that LP to death in a grotty South London flat throughout 1984 but didn't seem to possess it anymore. Then I remembered: I lost custody of all the Everything But The Girl albums at the closing of a former life, along with many others. Now, there's a whole new excuse to search for old vinyl...

The Vinyl Frontier is at 35, Grove Road, Eastbourne, East Sussex BN21 4TT.

Tender is the Day

The night after the General Election, only strong drink and loud, angry music was going to help me. After a diet of The Cramps, Crass and Public Image’s spectacular Theme on heavy rotation, I think I lapsed into a coma in the wee hours having finally forgotten that it was the start of, in Ken Livingstone’s words, “five more years of pure evil”.

Despite waking to the Sleaford Mods’ image of "the Prime Minister's face hanging in the clouds like Gary Oldman's Dracula", Saturday had a silver lining in the prospect of an in-store performance by Rozi Plain at the greatest record shop on the south coast, Music’s Not Dead.

Fresh from a Marc Riley session, a 6 Music Album of the Day accolade and a full band tour, Rozi had arrived solo in Bexhill on her way to a supporting Anna Calvi at Brighton Dome. Specialising in modern folk songs of reflective acceptance, her tender guitar playing and delicate vocals were the perfect balm for the soul after a night of discordant rage.

In a five song set that included three – Actually, Best Team, Jogalong - from her new album, Friend, Rozi demonstrated the versatility that enables her to be an incredibly confident solo performer and a member of close friend Kate Stables’ band, This Is The Kit. And with both acts performing at my festival of choice this summer - Green Man – I think that, come August, I might have got over the election result.

The Joyous Sound

Being a teacher of English Literature, I am often asked by students why everything they study is so miserable and serious. Happy and funny doesn’t make for greatness, I patronisingly say. And I have mostly thought that what applies to literature, also applies to music. Then I saw The Wave Pictures at the De La Warr Pavilion and I knew I was wrong. The London-based three-piece of David Tattersall on guitar and vocals, bassist Franic Rozycki and drummer Jonny Helm have a stripped simplicity, with their lack of effects pedals and crash cymbals, combining with witty and bittersweet lyrics to create a life-affirming sound – the joyous sound of greatness.

In January this year, Marc Riley’s radio show put me onto their single, Orange Juice, a collaboration with Stanley Brinks. With its defiant refrain of “But I’ll get by with a little bit of you”, it became an anthem to spite the endless wind and rain of winter and was played constantly in our house to the point that my seven-year-old daughter could sing every word. (I did have lie to her about some of the lyrics, though.) The single sent me to The Wave Pictures albums in their own right. They have been prolific since the start of the century and there are about a dozen of them. How could I have missed this band? I started with the two most recent albums, 2012’s Long Black Cars and last year’s City Forgiveness; and then I got lucky on two counts. Firstly, as I was playing the albums to death, the wonderful Music’s Not Dead record shop announced they were bringing them to Bexhill; and when they played on Friday night, most of their set was taken from these two albums.

There cannot be many better backdrops for a gig than a calm, millpond sea in the fading summer sunlight but, in the upstairs bar at the De La Warr, that is exactly what The Wave Pictures take the stage to. They immediately begin a running joke about Rozycki’s fondness for Bexhill as the place where he once spotted Keith Chegwin in the street. But the humour is not just confined to the between-the- songs chat, of which there is much. On the gorgeous Missoula, Tattersall sings “You make me feel like dancing/Naked across the motel room/My beer belly bouncing in the afternoon”, and the bathos is matched on latest album opener, All My Friends, beginning “Once I dreamed I saw your face on a carton of milk/Once I dreamed I spilled the milk all down my shirt”.

When it comes to the music, The Wave Pictures are very accomplished and simple does not mean samey; the guitar sound is at times clean and chiming, at others dirty and swampy, sometimes capacious and sprawling but all perfectly complemented by Rozycki’s meandering high-end bass runs. At various times in their set I am reminded of the Violent Femmes, Television, the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman; all great, all American - the City Forgiveness album was written on a six-week road trip around the States and it shows.

What is so incredible about the band is their infectious enjoyment of what they are doing. They never seem to stop smiling and nor do the audience. When the refrain in Spaghetti, from the Long Black Cars album, rhymes the title with “forget me”, I realise I am grinning like an idiot every time. And to add to the mood, in the middle of the set up pops a cover of the colourful and schizophrenic Texan musician Daniel Johnston’s Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Tattersall has an engaging and heartfelt voice but when Helm takes the vocals on the plaintive Atlanta, he shows that he too can be soulful and emotive; and even more so when he steps from behind his kit to sing two ballads. The swapping of roles does not end there: Tattersall takes bass (“I’m not very good on bass”) so that Rozycki can do a noodling guitar solo which he mostly gets right - their humour is also considerably self-deprecating.

My third stroke of good fortune may not be luck but judgement; two songs of theirs that I adore feature at the end of the set: Never Go Home Again, with its Bhundu Boys guitaring and visions of life on the road “There are bed bugs in my bed/There’s a headache in my head/Everything is in its proper place/And we wear the last town on our tired faces”, ends with a mass audience singalong. And when they return for the encores, their final song is the magnificent The Woods, a Modern Lovers guitar riff overlaid with near-hysterical lyrics taut with sexual tension.

This was my gig of the year so far; but with Music’s Not Dead and the De La Warr Pavilion bringing such good music to Bexhill there could be more greatness to come - but I’m pretty sure none of it will make me feel as happy as The Wave Pictures did.

Picture by Dave Stubbings

Eyeless in Bexhill

I had been playing the eponymously titled debut album by Eyes & No Eyes for the past week and I was intrigued to hear how they would replicate their impressive sound in the confines of a record shop in-store performance. But at Bexhill’s Music’s Not Dead yesterday, replete with drums and amplification, they demonstrated the full range of their tender sonic landscape.

Playing six tracks from the album, they opened with the wintery Hidden Thieves – “the snow it falls upon your street/betrays the movements of my feet” – with singer and guitarist Tristram Bawtree evoking the vocal fragility of Nick Drake over a mesh of guitar and cello. Cellist Becca Mears underpins the band’s sound in the same way that John Cale used strings to create the sonorous and brooding cacophony of the Velvet Underground. With shifting time signatures and improvised lead-ins, the set veers from genre to genre – folk, psychedelia, be-bop – but never quite settling in any.

At the centre of their set is Rust, with Thomas Heather’s thrilling drums and Marcus Hamblett’s intricate bass combining to create the sort of exciting experimental rhythms that New Order discovered in their earliest work, post-Joy Division. On Old Crow, Bawtree belies his youth sounding positively world-weary – “the things I’ve seen, boy/you won’t believe” – and set closer, and album opener, the sprawling Breathe In has the band at its most mournful and powerful. Bawtree’s guitar work is by turns delicate and abrasive as the song builds to a pulsing climax.

I am sure that Eyes & No Eyes would be even more impressive in a larger venue. However, being charmingly vague about future live dates, the Brighton band could only recall one imminent gig, next week at Bethnal Green’s Sebright Arms; but on the second day of their "two-day tour of East Sussex” (they had played the Café des Artistes in Lewes the night before) there was plenty of evidence that there will be an opportunity to see them on a bigger stage quite soon.

Picture by Dave Stubbings

Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience

When Ben Watt explained the genesis of the title of his new solo album, Hendra, tracing it back through his half-sister’s house and road in Somerset to the old Cornish word ‘hendre’, meaning ‘home’ or ‘home farm’, I understood why the singer, guitarist, producer, DJ and record label-owner had just arrived from the Charleston Festival. Performing in Bexhill yesterday evening, his gift for telling stories, either through song or speech, was plain to hear. At Charleston, the East Sussex home of the Bloomsbury group, he had been reading from Romany and Tom, the written story of his parents’ lives. Having now added literature to his oeuvre, with two published books, the former Everything But The Girl musician has established himself as a true polymath. And the fact that the wonderful Music’s Not Dead record shop, already promoting gigs at Eras of Style and the De La Warr Pavilion in the town, had persuaded Ben Watt to do an in-store is testament to their importance to live music in Sussex.

Arriving with a trio of guitars – “one of these is older than me” – and an amp, Watt treated the packed shop to an eight-song set, mostly drawn from Hendra. Having spent the past ten years immersed in the world of dance and electronica with his Buzzin’ Fly label, he is now on the more traditional ground of singer-songwriter and has been working with Bernard Butler and Dave Gilmour. Performing without a band, and experimenting with some open and interesting tunings, yesterday was a reminder of what a distinctive guitarist he is; and his plaintive voice perfectly suits his songs of grief and loss. His half-sister having inspired some of the album – he played the title track and The Levels, both dealing with the aftermath of her death – others, such as Golden Ratio, are inspired by the landscape. Although, Forget, which tells of walking on the Sussex Downs, was omitted due to its reliance on piano.

Growing older and having to leave the past behind is clearly another preoccupation: the beautiful Bricks and Wood, which didn’t make it onto the album, tells the story of an impromptu visit that Watt and his half-brother made to the now-derelict family home; and Young Man’s Game – “one more chance to leave a mark” - is a paean to the limits of middle-age. But the past doesn’t get left behind entirely. Defining his new material as songs of experience, Watt also reached back to his songs of innocence. Two tracks from his last solo album, 1983’s North Marine Drive, were played with that distinctive jazz-folk guitar sound of his debut all those years ago: the title track - inspired by the Scarborough coastal road, and to a lesser extent, a residential street in Bridlington, Watt tells us - and set-closer, the gorgeous Some Things Don’t Matter – “this boy, caught up in the wheels of fate” – that is, perhaps, rather a song of prescience.

Picture by Dave Stubbings

State of Independence

The centre of Bexhill-on-Sea is one of those rare places these days that has not become a clone town. Not being chock-full of hospitality chains and multiple retailers – they have been mostly confined to the Ravenside Leisure Park on the way out of town – it has retained an air of independence and an appearance of spontaneity. Perhaps because of this, it has gained an unfair reputation for being old-fashioned; the reality is, this is what towns are like if they don’t allow the demands of rapacious profiteering to prevail.

Firmly flying this flag of independence is record shop, Music’s Not Dead. Situated at the bottom of Devonshire Road, a short shuffle across from the De La Warr Pavilion, Music’s Not Dead stocks a wide range of music on CD, including new releases and an extensive amount of artists’ back-catalogues. Prices of most discs are surprisingly cheap and there is also a large section of bargain CDs at three for £12. I did spot a vinyl section, but I didn’t go too close being an ex-vinyl junkie in remission. There is also an area where you can sit down and read music magazines.

The shop was opened a couple of years ago by Del Querns and Richard Wortley and they have established a welcoming place for record rack flickers to browse and buy. And they are clearly very knowledgeable: when I visited, I picked up a copy of The Broken Family Band’s 2007 album Hello Love for a fiver (cheaper than Amazon) and was recommended to check out the lead singer’s most recent venture, Singing Adams.

As an experience – be it buying a new release, coming across a forgotten album you had always meant to get or talking to people about music – it has to beat downloading tracks bent over a computer or waiting for the postman to arrive with that cardboard packet. And the best thing of all, if I had not popped into Music’s Not Dead, I would never have found out about the live music they put on: Turin Brakes are playing in the shop next Sunday, 29th September, at 4pm - and it’s free.