So while the rest of the world seems to be off chasing Ossie Bin Liner up the Khyber Pass, we’re dotted around the Point watching four likely lads, the sort you’d figure would normally be running up a slate in a redbrick Uni. bar, blasting out a soundtrack befitting the clamour and serious damage of these times.

Even without knowing, you’d guess that Caretaker have an album out on Fierce Panda, but even for that label the guitars are industrially jagged, really bloody painful; in fact they’re easily one of the loudest, most painful bands I’ve ever encountered, as layer upon layer of chord and crescendo are ratcheted out over a flanged Joy Division bass, in a manner of what , until recently, would have been called, building-razing music. It’s a fantastically epic performance, mostly played bent double, guitars on their kneecaps, not so much shoegazing more looking -through-their-legs-gazing, and when it ceases I don’t need dawn’s early light and a cool pillow to tell me I’ve got screaming tinitus. Medium 21, also from London, have a lighter touch, but are still none-more-indie. They are a healthy cross between Bowie circa-‘Hunky Dory’ and Pulp after a good feed of Super Furry mushrooms, a feeling which is borne out when ‘Honeymoon Hearse’ careers amongst us like ‘White Light , White Heat’ wrapped round ‘Common People’. But, like Dan Black of The Servant, Medium 21’s singer John Clough has a quirky, vibrant world vision, spun out, despite the references, in a superbly original manner. But also like them, and indeed Caretaker, I fear they’re destined forever to out-perform everyone on a bill without leaving a track of real immediacy in our veins.

Bands like these are the bedrock of the alternative music scene, the essential live experience so diluted and flattened on our televisions. Still, it’d be good to think that when the first breath of an atomic wind rustles the autumn leaves, far away and not caring, in some underground shelter, Medium 21 will be having it large.

Paul Carrera