Oh, and since I’m being all-inclusive, I must confess to a couple of sneaky purchases yesterday lunchtime. Blame my friend David – he arranged to meet me for lunch, but in a record store!

I picked up Stereolab‘s ‘Fluorescences’ EP, and a David Holmes CD, ‘Bow Down To The Exit Sign’.

I used to be a huge fan of Stereolab. My first ever live show was McCarthy, the group which Stereolab grew out of. I find Stereolab can be of variable quality live – occasionally self-indulgent, but often brilliant. I like pretty much all of their records, although not with the passion with which I consumed albums like ‘Peng’ in 1992 and ‘Transient Random Noisebursts with Announcements’ in 1993. When I was trying to make money to make my transatlantic move in 1997, I sold most of the rare stuff I had by them. Anyway, Fluorescences was a Stereolab release which somehow fell through the tracks, and I had never heard it. And in fact I’ve still never heard it. Sounds stupid, huh? In fact, I often buy things and don’t really listen to them properly. I have a big, ugly 101-disc multi CD changer by Pioneer which serves up random tracks to me. So even if I’m lazy after buying something, I’ll always hear it in the end. That sounds pretty decadent and bad, doesn’t it….

Re: David Holmes, I really don’t know much about him, other than that like me, he was born in Belfast, but spends a lot of his time in New York. I have ‘Let’s Get Killed’, and it’s a kind of interesting ambient film-soundtracky kind of thing with a lot of samples of people from the street etc thrown in. This is his new one, and I’ll be interested to find out what direction he has gone in. Not interested enough to have put it on and listened to it last night, obviously, but quite interested!