Ok. If the best night of my life was when I saw REM at Warwick University in about 1983 and Green and Red played at about 2.00 in the morning and I was at the front doing the Woo Woo’s into the microphone that was thrust into the audience as they covered Sympathy for the Devil and Pete Buck played guitar and ignored me when I told him I loved him then the second best was seeing Giant Sand in the Co-operative Hall on the Cowley Road only a few years later.

Giant Sand are one of those bands.

They have been releasing records for more than thirty years one way or other either under the name of Giant Sand or under cover of main man, Howe Gelb, or one of his aliases. There is a sound to all of them – an out of kilter sun blasted sound, stuttering guitar…