''AT EASTER IN 1990, I attended a massive Aussie Diaspora picnic in Peaslake, Surrey. I don't know why. I was probably drunk. Dave McComb was there. He was definitely drunk...''

Very few artworks haunt me. Our culture itself haunts me, haunts the fuck out of me. Art, music, literature, in that they reflect, in that they sometimes glance ahead of a culture, might get a stranglehold on a mood, a day, a season – but they rarely haunt me...

My friend Kyle always had a lot of money and could get me into the expensive kind of trouble without the trouble sticking. He didn't mind paying for me if it meant raising hell with loyal company. We were seventeen. You only needed one reason to be friends at that age. I figured we had at least three. So we broke the law every day in every way and laughed our asses off at the fucking stupid world.

I got an email the other day asking me if I would write "some kind words and validation to help them sell records". The 'them' was The Triffids, the Australian band that found critical acclaim and not much else, in the 80’s. 'Kind words and validation' proffered by the critics back then didn't help them sell records and I don't know if ones by me, will now.

It seems strange to put 'In An Aeroplane Over The Sea' into a context of a time and place, it feels more like an exotic treasure from a forgotten era, such is its continual confounding appeal.

Falling off stages, stuffing his face with sweet treats and generally enthralling the friendly folk of Poland, our roving reporter Max Tundra look back at his recent tour...

The sleeve to Colossal Youth - Young Marble Giants' first and only album, shows three faces shadowed against the light, faces seemingly hewn out of granite. Two angular boys flank an equally mysterious girl. It's a black and grey, almost brutal, minimal picture that gives no sense of the beauty hidden inside the cover.