I was going to make a joke about how Germans like marching in formation but thought better of it.

There’s an exhibition on at the Tate Liverpool at the moment called Glam! The Performance of Style which looks interesting. Part of the show is a 1977 documentary called Roxette about young Roxy Music fans in Manchester getting dressed up to go see the band live. The whole movie is 30 minutes long and looks utterly fab judging by this short clip which makes me really want to see the entire thing (wish they’d used a different song though, don’t they know I posted “Beauty Queen” just last week!) I’d love to make it to Liverpool to see the show too but doubt if that’s on the cards.

Some pics from the exhibition here.

Low Sea are a duo made up of a Bosnian and a Liverpudlian who live in Ireland (that sounds like the set up for a joke) and make gothic, shoegazey synth pop. “Remote Viewing” is the title track from their new album out next month and is produced by Stephen Hague who in the past has manned the controls for Pet Shop Boys, New Order, and OMD which isn’t bad company to be in.

I adore David Bowie when he lets his inner art-school boy run wild and gives us brilliant WTF moments like this.

This rare clip is from 1979 and features our Dave with Klaus Nomi on backing vocals and Jimmy Destri of Blondie on keyboards. Fabulous stuff.

The Eccentronic Research Council are an experimental electronic combo fronted by actress Maxine Peake who is apparently quite a big star on the telly back home.

Their debut 1612 Underture is a concept album (a “sound poem” they call it — well, la-di-da) about the Pendle Witches, twelve young girls who were executed for being witches in 17th century Lancashire. The primitive electronics have the same haunted, weird-old-England vibe as Broadcast and the Ghost Box record label, and with Peake talking over the eerie bleeps and beats in her thick-as-gravy Bolton accent it sounds like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop playing with Gracie Fields — which I hope you think sounds like a very good thing.

Bloody marvelous, Susan and Joanne look lovely too. Of the two I think I preferred Joanne’s stiff “bored suburban girl at a disco” dance moves to Susan’s more flamboyant gestures.

I was quite disdainful of Gazza Numan at the time because he was such a blatant Bowie rip-off, but that’s the kind of sniffy attitude you have when you’re a late-teenage boy. I still think he was a Bowie rip-off but I also think this is a cracking record anyway and love that primitive synth noise — they sound like wheezing, gas-powered robots trying to march up a hill.

His lyrics are still stupid though.

I went to see Ladytron on Friday night and they were bloomin’ marvelous. You know how you know what a band is going to play for the encore because they haven’t played that song yet? Well, this is Ladytrons, I imagine they’ll be closing shows with this one until the end of time.

The encore can sometimes seem like a bit of a phony ritual, unless the band is booed off stage you know they’re coming back and in the States I’ve never seen a band play more than one which makes it seem all the more rote and expected. I remember at concerts in my youth bands were regularly dragged back for second and even third encores by the enthusiastic noise of the audience. Now, no matter how well the band are going down, they do one and it’s lights-on-go-home-everyone. Is that only an American phenomenon or is it just the bands I go to see?