Every now and again you hear a song so wonderful that it stops you dead in your tracks. You crave it like a drug and want to hear it again and again. Then you need to find out as much as you can about it: Who is the artist? Where are they from? When are they playing live near me!? How did this incredibly beautiful and fully formed piece of art come about? Video Games by Lana Del Rey is one such song.

Video Games grabs you by the heart on the very first listen and sends shivers down your spine and through your soul. It’s a haunting paean to love, or maybe loss. Or both. It is at once achingly familiar yet sounds like nothing else around. Lizzy Grant (Lana Del Rey seems to be the band name) has a voice reminiscent of Nancy Sinatra, and the lush strings eloquently recall the 1960s of Sinatra in her heyday. The nostalgic feel is emphasised by an unapologetically retro-styled video made up of home movie snippets which is perfectly suited to the mood of haunting melancholy. The figures appear flickering like ghosts from a forgotten past. A perfect complement to the song itself. Video Games is not overtly sentimental, like all great songs it possesses an underlying something that makes it at once sad and euphoric.

Video Games should see Lana Del Rey and Lizzy Grant making headlines all over the place once its released in October. The word of mouth is spreading and there’s already a buzz growing about this record which is fully deserved.

The following few years saw dwindling ticket sales and a mix of bands that can be politely described as ‘eclectic’. I’m not sure what the organisers thought a a field of heavy rock fans were going to make of Bonnie Tyler belting out ‘Lost In France’ but in those days they usually made their feelings felt by hurling plastic bottles towards the stage. Sometimes they had nothing in them. Sometimes.

Even though the festival was seemingly on its last legs in the late ’80s (one Friday afternoon in 1988 you could almost count the punters) there was often a hidden gem on the bill, and when you lived just five miles away the lure of the spaghetti-western-goth of Fields of The Nephilim or post-punk firebrands New Model Army was just too much to ignore. We kept going, dutifully returning year after year to that beer-soaked field.

When the Mean Fiddler organisation took over in 1989 and turned the fortunes around to make arguably the biggest Indie-Rock festival in the world. That year’s bill was a smorgasbord of late 80s alternative music and we duly gorged ourselves on New Order, the Pogues, the Wonder Stuff, The Mission, the Sugarcubes and My Bloody Valentine et al. As I recall the weather was fine too heralding in a new era. The rain saved itself for a deluge three years later when Nirvana famously headlined in several inches of mud and a festival legend was born.

I kept returning for about another eight years and witnessed the good, the bad and the very ugly of 90s indie music as festivals themselves became the cool thing to do in the summer. Highlights from then include Pavement, Neil Young, a young and hungry Suede, Pixies and many others that time and the influence of way too much grassy beer in cardboard cups has ultimately diminished.

The Reading Festival is the the ultimate ‘big gig in a field’ for those of us who occasionally like loud guitars and angsty lyrics. For me the desire to actually go has long since gone; I prefer my gigs more intimate and ‘civilised’ nowadays. But it’s still a special event, and when you live in the area it’s hard to escape it or its legion of young punters swarming over the town on the Bank Holiday weekend. Even the surrounding suburbs are not immune: last year I heard Arcade Fire drifting on the wind into my garden some five miles away.

In many ways it’s still a useful book end to the summer, once over you can look wistfully back at summer and towards autumn. For a while it’s had a name change twinned with Leeds, but it’ll always be the Reading Festival to me and I guess my indie heart is forever somewhere in a beer-soaked field in Berkshire listening to Pavement.

The four part harmonies sound as good as on the records. Boy these bearded chaps can sing!

Pecknold is not entirely comfortable with audience engagement, but his sentiments are clearly genuine. He called us ‘…sweet’!

Mykonos is fabulous and comes about six songs in. But the flute got a bit lost and sounded like feedback from where I was (standing in the stalls). A very minor gripe.

Two full albums in and Fleet Foxes already have more great songs than most bands will have in a lifetime. As showcased by the middle section of last night’s gig: Your Protector, Tiger Mountain Peasant Song, White Winter Hymnal, Ragged Wood. Um, wow!

Montezuma - a personal favourite from the new album – is bloody awesome and seamlessly drifts into He Doesn’t Know Why. Which is also rather stupendous.

There are a lot of instruments on the stage, and they all get played beautifully…apart from that slightly irritating mangled sax at the end of The Shrine/An Argument. Pecknold then delivers Blue Spotted Tail which is a very soothing balm.

Just when you thought all their classics had been delivered the final (pre-encore) song is Blue Ridge Mountains.

The final song of the encore is Helplessness Blues and it’s delivered with full throated gusto, sounding even better than the recorded version. A rather fitting finale.

Aldred starts bravely, emerging on to the stage alone with an acoustic guitar. My God Betrays sees him, lyrically at least, taking on The Big Guy (no, not Elbow’s leader) in his own back yard. There’s a wonderful moment when you just know it’s going to be a good night as the song’s anguished refrain echoes around all this 19th Century stone and wood “…oh my God betrays, seen turning the cheek, turn in on the weak and piss all the promise away”. Crikey.

Whilst comparison with Elbow, I Am Kloot and Hawley is largely to be expected (‘adult indie melancholists’ perhaps?) it might be Doves that Cherry Ghost have the most in common with, although some of the country rock inflections favoured by Aldred are largely absent from the work of Manchester trio. In some respects Simon Aldred is not really a ‘front man’ at all, happy to sing the songs he writes and play second guitar to Jim Rhodes‘ fine lead. The most you’ll get from Aldred is a polite but cursory ‘Thanks a lot, cheers’ in between songs, although he did opine during a prolonged bout of retuning and knob-twiddling that ‘getting pissed and thrashing out three chords’ is not for him as ‘he’d be found out’. All of which is perfectly fine in my book - if you want stand-up then go to a comedy club. If you want great songs and high-quality musicianship then you really should acquaint yourself with Cherry Ghost.

There’s plenty to admire in the first half of the set which is dominated by the excellent recent album Beneath This Burning Shoreline. The songs, if anything, are more intense and dark than those from debut Thirst For Romance. Aldred has said that they sound more like the work of a band, and it’s true, here they sound accomplished and confident. The brilliant 4am momentarily changes the mood, its bouncing melody and lilting acoustic feel dusted lightly with the spirit of Johnny Cash.

After an hour of a set which gets better with time things draw to a close and it’s here where I have my only (minor) gripe. Set-closer and Ivor Novello Award winner People Help The People is, perhaps inevitably, a slower stripped-down version in keeping with the mood and surroundings, but for me it just fails to soar in the way of the studio version, and any subtlety gets a little consumed by the whole sound. That said this didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for what was a fantastic set, superbly delivered.

It’s Mathematics, of course, which brings the inevitable encore to a close, and it is a rich and faithful rendition that manages to stay honest to the recorded version in all its sweeping glory. Then we’re off and out along Compton Terrace into the cool early spring night, with more than enough fantastic tunes swimming around in the head to last the whole journey home.

Engleby then, might be seen as a departure from his usual comfort zone. It’s certainly not a conventional love story by any stretch of the imagination, nor is it a historical novel, though large sections contain recollections of the minutiae of life in the seventies and eighties.

It is the story of Mike Engleby as retold in the form of extracts from his own journal. The titular protagonist is a seemingly unremarkable working class boy from Reading who wins a scholarship to an imposing public school, where he is bullied mercilessly. Engleby moves on to an unnamed university we know to be Cambridge, he struggles to make friends but develops a relationship of sorts with fellow student Jen Arkland. When she suddenly disappears, the book changes from an intriguing and slightly skewed ’70s nostalgia trip into something altogether darker. 

Engleby throbs with a vibrant intelligence from start to finish. It’s a serious book with a big theme at its heart, yet has genuinely funny moments; a feat which is a testament to Faulks and his ability to craft something different from the novel format. In writing predominantly from Engleby’s own viewpoint the reader is forced inside this troubled, complex character’s mind and at times this is a strange and uncomfortable place to be.  

Engleby is a challenging and thought-provoking novel; it won’t be to everyone’s tastes as it is genuinely dark, and the pace, whilst not slow, meanders a little at times. For large parts not a lot actually happens either. That said I found it to be an utterly captivating (especially the second half), completely satisfying and genuinely moving story that I would recommend highly.

Anyway, back to Radio Four (or 4?). Where else could you listen to an hour long programme about an extraordinary man called Arthur Mee? I learned that he was a true Victorian polymath: celebrated author, journalist and educator whose most famous work was The Children’s Encyclopaedia. It was fascinating stuff and let’s be honest, only a public service broadcaster is going to offer this sort of thing. I think I get pretty good value for my licence fee all things considered.

When I was but a lad I remember vividly the first time I saw Cool Hand Luke. I guess I must have been twelve or thirteen years old maybe, so this is the tale end of the seventies – the film was made in 1967 which was the year I was born. It had a profound effect on me. I was startled and disturbed by the depiction of the Deep South; the film gave me the impression of a brutal and unforgiving land where vengeful lawmakers dished out rough justice with an old testament zeal. I was utterly captivated by Newman’s central peformance as the wisecracking and laconic Luke, who was at odds with the entire system. I guess there is an underlying allegory there about the new generation kicking against the old ways, or even some kind of biblical aspect, with Newman’s character in the role of Christ with his fellow prisoners the disciples who grow to see him as a saviour, and eventually a martyr of course. Either way to me it was one of the most memorable films I remember seeing on TV in my youth, not least for its glut of memorable scenes. When you’re thirteen and living in the home counties that car wash scene gets talked about a lot in the school playground the next day, and I know that I couldn’t eat boiled eggs again for some time too after that particular scene.

Not only was Newman a fine actor who appeared in so many great films over the years too numerous to mention, but he was quite the philanthropist who set up charitable foundations and gave away considerable amounts of his own money to good causes. A thoroughly decent human being all round, he’ll be missed.