I can't imagine it's deliberate, but The Plastic Guru from Gorillaz's last album sounds very much, to my ears, like circa-2003 Grandaddy. The little samples, the robotic vocal clips, the metronomic beat. All it's missing is a lovely distorted guitar solo.
Can anyone else hear it, or is it just me?
I was in my very early 20s when UtWF came out. It blew me away. It opened my eyes and ears to all sorts of new sounds and ideas that still inform the music I listen to today. Its themes also chimed significantly with my emotional life at the time.
A couple of years later, I wanted to thank the band for it. I wrote a letter to the address in the UtWF CD booklet and thought nothing more of it. I can’t remember how many weeks elapsed, but one day this letter arrived through my letterbox. The dates were for the tour that supported The Sophtware Slump, which the envelope tells me had not been released. I went to two shows on that tour, meeting Aaron at one and hanging out a little with Jim, Aaron and Kevin after the second.
The letter also included a bunch of stickers, most of which I used on guitars and folders and things like that. I probably gave some to a girl.
Anyway, I just wanted to share this. I grew up in a very small, very conservative, very dull town. It didn’t occur to me for a long time that actual people made the things I loved. It took university and a move to London for me to realise that I could actually try speak with some of these people.
The letter and that tour are more than a quarter of a century old but thinking about them still makes me extremely happy.