New stuff from The Popguns

You can - and you should - be preordering the new album from The Popguns - yes, The Popguns - right now.

Popguns weekend: Someone You Love

Never mind the quality, enjoy the quality:

Suddenly I was part of everything
The moment I heard you saying my name
My world was aflame

All the things that I may have dreamed of
Before that day are not now important
And this is what you've meant

[This concludes The Popguns weekend]

Popguns weekend: Live in Brighton

Another live Popguns track, Gone - this time live on homeground, at the Brighton Free Butt. These date from a mini-reunion in 2003:



[Part of

Popguns weekend: Live in Plymouth

Thanks to Pat Walkington - who was the band bassist - there's a few chunks of live Popguns online.

Waiting For The Winter, live at The Cooperage in Plymouth:

"

Don't Smile, from the same gig:



... and Bye Bye Baby:



[Part of The Popguns weekend]

Popguns weekend: Waiting For The Winter

This is a lovely song. It's also lovely because it comes taped from Transmission. A programme of which those who lived in the North of England spoke of lovingly, which frustrated indiekids in the TVS region never got to see. Unless they found themselves in a bedsit in Leeds, and working through a pile of shaky VHS tapes.



[Part of The Popguns weekend

Popguns weekend: Still A World Away

They used to get a bit stoppy when people suggested they were interesting because their drummer had been in The Wedding Present. Which is understandable, because who would want to think that the job your drummer was sacked from was the highpoint of your offering?



[Part of The Popguns weekend]

Embed and breakfast man: The Popguns

Sure, Brighton is seen as a creative place, but when I was growing up there, it wasn't exactly knee-deep in local bands. There was The Groove Farm; Bobby Gillespie would commute to his drug den from the seafront; and as the Evening Argus never tired of reminding us, Annie Nightingale lived amongst us. But supporting local bands was a bit like supporting Brighton And Hove Albion - it was very unusual to find yourself cheering success at a national level.

God, when Mung Bean Jesus got picked up as a running punchline in the NME Thrills! section, it was more attention than the paper had given Brighton bands in a decade and a half.

So what could have been more exciting than a proper Brighton brand actually doing well? ("Doing well" here meaning Peel plays, small features in the pop papers, actually grinding tour duties.) Reading fanzine interviews where the group, asked to pick their favourite piece of water, chose the sea down at the end of Holland Road. Holland Road! Where my Dad bought his cars! And would return them, frequently, as was the style in you drove British Leyland vehicles. That was exciting.

And they were pretty special, too. They were The Popguns. And this is what they sounded like. This is Landslide:



Buy
Another Year, Another Address: The best of the Midnight Years
Love Junky

Popguns around the web
The official site
Popguns on Last FM

More Popguns across the weekend
Still A World Away
Waiting For The Winter
Live in Plymouth
Live in Brighton
Someone You Love

Easter track smackdown: Round three - Mohobishopi

[Follow the Easter Track Smackdown tag for all the pieces to date]

With Amazon holding onto a slim lead over Last FM, we reach round three of this weekend's battle to prove, sort-of-conclusively, which of the various online music services are, by some measure, "the best".

The third challenge is MoHoBishOpi's Names For Nameless Things. Coming out of Wales in 1996, briefly the Mos - or were they the Bishes? - were forced to trade under the weight of the NME's next big thing label. Although only for a couple of weeks. They were brilliant live, but there's no way you can say that without making it sound like the faintest of praise; they managed a handful of singles and a single album before falling apart in 2002.

But: does their spirit live on online? Or has their clumsy punctuation doomed them to hide from the faithful forever? Let's see:

Spotify:
The name, punctuated or not, fails to generate a response. The song title fails to generate a response. Spotify, you were meant to be the future of music: you're looking like an empty ship right now. Zero, again.

Last FM:
Using asterisks rather than dashes, Last FM turns up the band, but Names For Nameless Things isn't part of the music on offer. There are two full tracks, though, so two bonus points for a good try.

iTunes:
Scratches its digital head faced with the band name, and suggests trying a "power search". Which fails to find Names For Nameless Things, and suggests trying another "power search". No points.

we7:
What? Don't worry about what you're looking for - we've got digital versions of Black Sabbath. And Kings Of Leon. Will that do?

No points.

YouTube:
The search engine starts off by guessing that you're looking for experts in matters Islamic before falling quiet and offering a Sweeping The Nation playlist which features the clip for Hear The Air, but more importantly has this:



The Popguns from Brighton, doing Waiting For The Winter - and, as if to crystalize the 1980s indieness of it all, it's taped from Yorkshire TV's legendary Transmission programme.

So, YouTube offers a couple of tracks by the band, but scores zero, while Sweeping The Nation gets half a point for having The Popguns. If you don't like the way the scoring is working, complain to Ben Goldacre.

Amazon:
Their search engine reveals there are no downloads on offer, but does point towards some physical records you can buy. Which is fine, and does include a second-hand copy of Names For Nameless Things for a penny, but isn't instantaneous, is it? No marks.

Imeem:
Unhelpfully, when looking for the track name, suggests that I might want to watch a video exploring if the Harry Potter books are any good. Zero.

emusic:
The rotten search engine spits back when asked for MoHoBishOpi, and suggests that 'it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing' is, somehow, a match for the song title. Man, their search needs help.

So, although we had a lovely swerve into the Popguns, the actual song we were looking for is beyond the fingers of digitalisation. Ten marks off for the internet as a whole.

After three rounds:

Amazon - 14
Last FM - 12
YouTube - 10
iTunes - 05
Imeem - 01
Sweeping The Nation - 0.5
We7 - 00
Spotify - 00
eMusic - -04
The Internet as a whole - -10

Three more rounds tomorrow, Sunday and Monday at roughly the same times as today's went live. Coming next: can Tim Berners Lee bring a showtune classic as rendered by the Dalek's foe into our living rooms?