If you like Velvet Underground, Ultravox, Japan and er… Barrie and Morricone film scores you may like Veldt. 7, February 2007

Here is a video of one of my favourite bands Veldt. They are highly obscure – even here – but rather good and they come from Sussex, the most important place in the world, namely from Brighton, which is almost the most important place in Sussex… but not quite.

I especially like this vid because I’d lay bets they filmed the outdoors bits at places where I’ve often been. It’s a bit like Hazel O’Connor’s Will You, it has a second instrumental half which they’ve left out and like Will You, the two are a pair and it suffers for the omission.

Veldt’s album, The Cause, The Effect is one of my top two albums of 2006. It’s very serious (unlike the band members who have the kind of laconic, dry humour I warm to).

By posting this one song here I may be doing it or Veldt an injustice. The Cause, The Effect is a whole work rather than a series of individual songs – a bit like some of Pink Floyd’s albums – and similarly, only one or two of the songs bear being separated from the whole, the rest kind of go together. I do have three favourite tracks; Good Morning, Vignette and Bullet but on the whole I find that once I start I have to sit down and listen to the whole thing.

I didn’t find out about them on my own. In fact, to be honest, they found me.

I have a Myspace account – a drastic course of action taken after Grandaddy split up and I didn’t find out about it until 6 months afterwards. Veldt sent me a note saying they thought I might like their music because they’d looked at my page and seen I liked the Divine Comedy. They invited me to go to their page and have a listen. If I liked them, they said, would I add them to my list of Myspace cyberfriends? If not, they said, no worries just delete their request to be friends.

Lots of groups will ask if you’d like to add them to your cyber-buddies list on Myspace but very few of them actually send you a note as well. Veldt are one of only two groups to do this and were the first so I was rather impressed.

How could I turn down a request from such nice polite boys, I thought? So I went and listened to their stuff. I think it’s great. I told them and ended up having a bit of a cyber-chat with their lead singer about Syd Barrett. That was even more impressive I thought.

No airs and graces. 10 out of 10. But I digress… here’s the video.

Enjoy.

If you want to know more, have a look at their MySpace profile (and listen to more songs) here. I urge you to go there because they’re splendid.