Over at No Rock and Roll Fun, Simon is being besieged by Ocean Colour Scene fans who really can't handle criticism of the world's most boring band. Those who thought all the fun had been drained out of making fun of the duffers' section of Britpop a decade ago might be amused to read the comments.

It's strange that bands who seemed too routine and non-descript to have fans in their heyday are still around ten years later. But stranger still that they have fiercely loyal and fiercely defensive fans. I tend to lose track of even the most interesting bands for years - I mean, I was a Cocteau Twins fanatic in the early 80s but somehow missed all their albums after 1984's Treasure - and am only now catching up with the less chilly but still marvelous pleasures of Heaven or Las Vegas (1990) and Milk and Kisses (1996). The idea that people can devote themselves for fifteen or so years to bands so plodding mundane and unoriginal as, well, not just Ocean Colour Scene but they'll do as an example, and resist the lure of the new (or, given my current fixation with Italian and now Brazilian and Argentinian psych/prog of the early 70s, the very old) strikes me as almost clinically unheathy.