The jetlag from my experiences in the States with The Joy Formidable hasn't abated. I'm very fuzzy-headed and can't quite fathom where I am and who I am about to see. This isn't a great state of mind to operate under when you're the promoter of the gig.

Sparrowhawks are from Deeside and Llangollen in north east Wales. I've eulogised them previously on these pages. I mentioned Pentangle and Fairport Convention - two over-used comparisons here at the tail-end of a folk revival that has dulled to conservatism many aspects of 'modern music'.

The arena-busting success of Mumford & Sons, for example, has given the acoustic guitar and an impassioned vocal all of the cutting edge of Phil Collins' shiny pate.

Thankfully, Sparrowhawks have much more guile. They aren't plagiaristic strummers, hacking through chord sequences long since shorn of bite. They shimmer and confound easy expectations with a musical dexterity that's very rare round these parts. Round any parts. There's a distinct West Coast/Laurel Canyon vibe, but not something contrived or unconvincing considering where the band actually originate.

Sparrowhawks

Sweet Baboo

It's too hot to breathe, let alone listen to molten, leftfield, musical aceness. Central Station has a tin roof and tonight all of the cats are inside being baked. As Mowbird plug their instruments in, I'm dreaming of being reincarnated as a salmon, leaping out of chill, frothy waters on my way to a spawning ground up near the Arctic Circle. Or an ice cream bath.

Mowbird are surf twang gone so wrong, it's right; Guided By Voices distracted by UFO tail lights; liberated garage punks grottying canvases in an art school studio.

They start off Shaky and finish Jerry Lee Lewis. They're The Castaways' Liar Liar in a Molotov Cocktail aimed at SyCo HQ. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

So, despite an apparent lack of familiarity with their own songs at the start of the set, they still have tunes to dye your hair for. Scratchy, fuzzy things that burst and pop with off kilter melodies half inched from the B movies of a parallel dimension. Or The Pixies' first two albums.

I really need to learn some contemporary reference points.

So much of the music I hear is overboiled tasteless by its own competence: bands who've sacrificed the fun out of it all before the Altar of Sheen. Even David Beckham - a man who looks like he could find his own visage in a coal forest on a cloudclad, midwinter night - would struggle to see his reflection in Mowbird.

They are great fun. Wrexham cocks up the B-52's, more-or-less magnificently.

Gareth Bonello is natural music. That's not great English, but a perfect summation of the man. In The Wire ("the Greatest TV Show Ever Made"™ - The Guardian reviews section) those with a natural inclination to protect and serve their districts are called 'natural police'. Gareth has a natural inclination to bewitch and move his audience. He is 'natural music'. Grammar and syntax can go jump themselves upside the river.

As subtly wondrous as his guitar playing is, it's always subservient to the song, and - in particular - his voice. Gareth has a voice like a broken heart. It's stained with resignation, eroded by cruel winds, challenging gravity like those unfathomable rock edifices in Monument Valley. It's one of the great Welsh voices. But it's a storyteller's voice rather than a singer's voice. And all the better for that.

The obvious, internationally-recognised reference points for his music - Nick Drake, John Martyn, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - are somewhat misleading because this is a music steeped in Wales. It's mysterious with early morning mist obscuring the valley's sides; burnished by the sunrise trying to break through.

There is a timeless gravitas that comes from Gareth's knowledge of the history of song in Wales. There are words and musical phrases that resonate, regardless of their age. There are no awkward concessions to contemporaneity, no baubles of modernism. Gareth is like a dry stone waller, or a traditional carpenter, there is an elemental, timeless truth to his work that makes it especially resonant and valuable in our age of the temporary, shallow and ephemeral.

His opening song Aubade is about as close as I've ever heard to my soul's harmonic frequency. He plays it, and it vibrates tears, yearning and regret out of every pore. Oh Lord, I love great music - simultaneously hurting and healing in the same cadence.

Richard James is tonight's headliner. "I'm going to be playing some songs from an album that was released two weeks ago, and some other songs that haven't been released yet, with Gareth Bonello and Andy Fung. A lot of these songs are quite, erm, well - I dunno - without being too articulate about it, erm, miserable... so, you're in for a treat! It's about the misery of the heart. I think they're joyous as well..."

And so begins one of the most magical hours of music I have ever witnessed. The sound is so quiet and delicate that the audience bend, as one, closer to the stage, like sunflower heads craning towards a source of light and life.

Richard James mightn't feel articulate speaking about his music but there are few as musically articulate. And - like many of the greatest artists - he works his spells within a deliberately self-limited range. Gorky's - his former band - were a supernova of creative thought, more ideas in single songs than some artists manage in entire lifespans. There were bells, whistles, school orchestras, xylophones, sword mangels and recorders: an entire rainbow of wildly enthusiastic sounds.

Wonder and possibility radiated from every note. It's somewhat amazing to consider that we had them and Super Furry Animals at the same time. A Facebook friend opined recently that music's golden age ended in 1979, and that nothing of equable worth had happened since; well, she can't have been listening to Gorky's or the Furries from 1996 until the middle of the last decade, because that's as high a watermark as any.

Hmmm. Gorky's is Richard's past. He's been making superlative solo albums for the best part of a decade. But his evolution, from exuberant school kid set free in a sweet shop of the imagination, to an artist of great capability and restraint, who wields less with an emotive power that is the match of the more, more, more thrills of his youth, is a fascinating one.

So we have two guitars, three voices, one bongo (or some such, sorry Andy!), an occasional harmonica, and sometime unique use of a pair of sunglasses/beerglass, in conjunction with the unnamed drum. But within that apparently limited range, we get a panoramic tour of the infinite vistas of the heart.

I've rarely seen an audience as attentive as this most excellent of audiences is. I swear, on occasion the music is as hushed as whispers on a breeze, but no one makes a sound. No one dares breathe. The sound of my camera's shutter is louder than the drum. Drawing us all more and more into the music's irresistible undertow.

When Richard sings his "most miserable" song (which may be called Down To My Heart, but there are fleas with a better memory for names than me) I think we could all - to a man and a woman - die in that eternal moment - melancholic and content. I think this music, this sensation, is priceless because it reminds us all that we're not alone. The high fallutin' call it pathos, or bathos - whatever the correct terminology is - it's a musketeer of hope and empathy. The guitars are subtle shimmers, the unnamed drum a heartbeat, the voice an irresistible glow. Music this nakedly human is rare. If you want a signpost, think Neil Young's Harvest.

Then we're in the midst of a 10 minute raga, sucking our souls to metaphysical places of hallucinatory wonder. Shamanistic and about as good as human artistic endeavour can get. Please don't make the mistake of thinking I'm exaggerating. This was the Sistine Chapel in acoustic guitar; Monet in minor thirds; a series of plaintive, folk sonnets that Shakespeare would have stood to applaud.

My gauchely-lobbed hyperbole is in inverse proportion to how subtly exquisite this was. All of it. Thank you Richard. Thank you Gareth. Thank you Andy. Thank you ears. Thank you heart.

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As a homecoming present to their Welsh audience, they said they'd play Start Something, their second album, in its entirety. They promised us a special show. They delivered, in spades.

Pontypridd's Lostprophets have today confirmed today that their 28 April homecoming show at Cardiff's Motorpoint Arena will be a special one-off, with their modern rock classic second album Start Something being played in its entirety.

He might have represented Cyprus at Eurovision in 2010, but these days Jon Lilygreen is making an unusual start to his major-label quest for music stardom.

Lilygreen and Jon Maguire - as the duo Lilygreen And Maguire - have recently signed to Warner Brothers records, and are currently on a busking tour of Wales.

Two Welsh acts have been added to the supporting bill for this summer's Hard Rock Calling in London's Hyde Park.

So, to my last day with The Joy Formidable. Typical that I should get used to the touring bus lifestyle on my final day with them. I slept last night; if not like a baby, well, like a big-sideburned toddler.

The trip from Philadelphia to Boston takes over seven hours, so we're still in transit when I wake up early and eager to get yesterday's tour blog in before my colleagues at the BBC finish work. A rather dead, wintery landscape - dead fields and leafless woods - rolls by in the bus window. By the time I have finished my scrawl about Philly, Boston has crept up all around us. We're quite a distance from downtown Boston. No skyscrapers here. We're in the university district and it's disconcertingly like a British town.

Hertfordshire rock festival Sonisphere has been cancelled, organisers have confirmed this morning.

I don't know anything about folk music, not really. I know I'm not much inspired by the folk stereotype: someone lost in the past with a finger in their ear. But using stereotypes to judge music is asinine: you could consign all country and western into a bin marked Billy Ray Cyrus, and all dubstep into a skip with Skrillex's name daubed on the side in a very stupid haircut.

Julie Murphy is a folk musician, but that four-letter word - dragging hundreds of years of culture and social history behind it - doesn't cover half of Julie's scope. Given four times the space I have here, I'd be hard pushed to scratch at the surface of the rest. Every one of the songs she sings has a story to it, with roots in her life, and a whole network of roots stretching back into pasts almost forgotten. Importantly, all of those roots link to the song flowering in that moment, on that stage, in front of we, the fortunate audience.

So we become part of that song's story, too.

It's quite a naturalistic feat. Organically inclusive - and all the more powerful for it.

I come to Theatr Clwyd with my own dragnet of memories. I kissed my first love in the corridor next to this room. I played my second ever gig on that stage. We hosted a brilliant Radio Wales Music Day concert here last March. This venue has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I'm on Proustian overload. If someone started baking a cake with a half-remembered scent, my long-term memory would explode in a cloud of luminous spores.

I'm here with my daughter Ava. She's nine. I'm not trying to impose music on her, but I do dearly want her to witness the magic of live, human performance, those distinct from dance routines, pyrotechnics and Auto Tune. I couldn't have brought her to see anyone better.

My mum and dad have come along, too. Ava and I got in on the guest list, I let my mum and dad pay; to assuage my freeloader guilt, probably.

My first experience of 'folk' music would have been my dad's early Bob Dylan albums. When I started listening to them in the late 70s/early 80s, they didn't sound like historical artefacts. They sounded scary, formidable, alive and prescient. Dylan's please-yourself voice had a mischievous truth to it. I pretended I didn't like it. I complained every time A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall or It's Alright Ma soundtracked Sunday tea (it was never ready in time for lunch). But I soaked it all up with silica gel ears.

This isn't much like my usual kind of gig. No one's outside smoking like their life depended on it. The bus passes in inside pockets aren't taking the audience to campuses. The moment Julie walks to the piano a pristine silence cloaks the room. There isn't a single jerk at the bar half spilling a pint of Guinness, while being boorish down a mobile phone. No one - not a single solitary person - watches the ensuing concert on an iPhone screen. Can you imagine that?

Julie begins by telling us about Essex Song. She's from Essex originally. Old maps showed her where the fields were, where the farriers and blacksmiths lived; the new maps are anonymous suburban sprawl. Things had been built on and forgotten. Folk music's philosophy is a lot about not forgetting stuff. Julie's art is in taking these things out from behind glass and breathing now and heart into them. The loss of geographical history in Essex Song is a metaphor for that ache of being that permeates every heart. It's sort of what makes us human.

Although I don't have proof, I don't think cows get maudlin looking at old maps.

It's a beautiful opening. Julie's much lauded voice is lauded for good reason. We hear so many people sing in accents and mannerisms like viruses, it's an awe-inspiring shock to hear someone sing so naturally, with so much truth. Julie Murphy could sing you the News Of The World and you'd believe every word. Murdoch missed a trick, there. Julie wouldn't have been for the buying, though. You could bet your firstborn on that.

My firstborn is faring well. She is entranced. Partly this is because Julie is accompanied by Ceri Jones. Ceri is a harpist and trombonist of Canadian and Ukrainian heritage. Ava has been learning the euphonium in school. Her best friend Mimi is learning the trombone.

"...But she doesn't sound like that."

I bet she doesn't.

Ceri's brass and harp are subtle and wonderful embellishments. They help alleviate some of the gravitas of the songs. An unaccompanied piano - regardless of who's playing it, Les Dawson excepted - playing minor chords can get lost in its own profundity. Not here, though.

Julie tells us how these songs grew out of a piano hitherto abandoned in a corner of her house. How the notes that became songs filled the gap left by her flown children. How hanging out in the kitchen with music making friends baked her a new album without her having to pay much attention to ingredients and instructions.

The next lyric repeats the line: "You are flown from me, but I'm always with you" - an unadorned, heartfelt and moving truth that exemplifies Julie's economic poetry. Quite what she'd make of my blather, I don't want to know...

We hear Two Sisters, a traditional song about one sister murdering another, but, Julie proclaims gleefully, "it has a happy ending..."

As far as I can tell, that happy ending involves the body of the dead sister being fashioned into a fiddle that then gets taken to the murderous sister's wedding, where it (the fiddle) tells the assembled guests what really happened, a plot that makes EastEnders look like In The Night Garden.

Julie finishes the first of her two sets with The Fountain (from her excellent new album A Quiet House). It's a wonderful song - a starkly beautiful Welsh cousin of Joni Mitchell's Carey, all rooted in fraying - but increasingly precious - memories of Padua. Imagine Laurel Canyon under occluded skies and you have it.

Better still, invest in a copy of the album. You'll be hard pressed to find anything more moving, plaintive or intuitive, from any era or genre.

Ava is way past her bedtime, so - with great reluctance - we drift home during the interval, our hearts filled with Julie's music and a hundred new stories.

Julie Murphy launches the new album with a webcast from www.juliemurphymusic.com on Monday 16 April at 8.30pm.

Harry Keyworth has got hands like slabs of stone. By day he's a builder in West Wales; by night he's a gobsmackingly dextrous acoustic guitarist and singer songwriter.

This, he tells us from the stage, is only his fourth gig.

I didn't sleep a wink the night before. At 4.30am, sat with eyes like pickled onions in front of my computer with a camomile tea that was neither 'soothing' nor 'relaxing' me, I decided that putting gigs on wasn't for me. The thing that had kept me up was, strangely, a good-mannered kindness:

"Sorry I won't be able to make it, I'm a bit skint. I'm sure you'll have a great time and a lovely crowd."

The problem was, I had received that message - or variations of it - from about 20 people; 20 of the people who'd been good enough to invest their hard-earned money in my previous gigs.

No-one will turn up. You'll have dragged Laura J Martin, Gorky's legend Richard James and Trwbador up to play in front of a barfly and a red-faced promoter having a nervous breakdown...

It was the "I'm sure you'll have a lovely crowd" bit that was circling my mind like a wide-beaked vulture eyeing my reputation - such as it is - with dead, hungry eyes.

You wouldn't be so sure if you'd received as many messages like yours as I have.

Twitter woke up and started to scroll through the sleepless fug. I saw a message from John Rostron - King of Sŵn - and wondered how the hell he managed to make a living doing this, promoting, without bursting into one big ulcer. The thought became a tweet, without me having much memory of typing it, and then John replied. It was such a short, succinct message - even for a tweet - but one atypically sharp with wisdom:

"I think I just remind myself I could be doing something I didn't love. That, plus I sit on my backside playing a LOT of Xbox..."

That was the cold glass of water in the face I needed. He was so, so right. I put bands on because I love them. I want people to hear the music that I most love, that's what the haemoglobin in my blood carries. Putting gigs on in these austere times is like altitude training for that love, because the things of true beauty and wonder become that much more valuable when most other things in the world have been shown up to be transparent with lies and fakes and worry.

The bill tonight couldn't have been more beautiful or wondrous if it had been animated by Studio Ghibli. Our first performer, Sophie Ballamy, is a songwriter of rare flair and talent.

Flair is the right word, trust me. Over the years, I've heard millions of dullards zombie deathwalk their way through ploddy chord sequences a slug could predict. I've heard every conceivable variation of the 'fire', 'desire', 'higher' lyrical gruel. I can smell a stale fart songwriter from a million paces. Some of us just weren't born to fly. Sophie, however, modestly soars.

I hate adverbs. Passionately. But Sophie is both modest and soaring so you'll have to forgive me. She doesn't look like she'd say 'excuse me' to a duckling barring a fire exit, but her songs and her guitar playing are giddy with playfulness and invention. I could make a hundred hackneyed comparisons to other female songwriters, on the basis of Sophie's chromosomes, but instead I implore you to check her songs out. They make the world a lot of a little better.

Y Niwl's Sîon Glyn is DJing for us tonight, and playing amazing records I have never heard before. He's another musical giver; a man whose DNA spirals like a Coltrane solo.

Trwbador are a gemstone of a band. I spent much of my youth traipsing through quarries, or over beaches, eyes desperate for the glitter of a piece of amethyst, citrine, cornelian, agate, garnet or smoky quartz. I didn't find any of those, ever. I found a lot of broken glass and used condoms; dead jellyfish and faded detergent bottles. A salutary lesson for life.

But in Trwbador - and here's a World Record of a mixed metaphor - all of those gemstones have come home to roost. Angharad's voice is flawless, diffracting the gamut of human emotion into a rainbow of perfect colours. There's no faux emoting, no artless vibrato, none of the X Factor, stage school mannerisms that smear so many other voices in effluent. There is just Angharad and notes that are glad to have been faceted so perfectly.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Trwbador are petrified with nerves. They're so still. Angharad stands at an angle that makes it almost impossible to see her face. If I had a face four fathoms below Angharad's on the beauty scale, I'd show it at every opportunity. I'd insist that these BBC blogs flowed over a background image of my grinning mush.

But I don't think Trwbador are nervous. I think it takes great confidence in what you're doing to strip your songs to the barest bones - voice, acoustic guitar, glockenspiel and lonely bass drum - and play them in front of strangers.

None of us are strangers for long. The whole room hugs these songs to their hearts. Trwbador are so perfect I'm having a little weep just thinking about it.

I have a little rant about Kasabian and Elbow and orchestras and big sounds signifying nothing from the stage. I use a bad swear word in front of my mum. Sorry mum.

And then, even after all the glittering wonders and beauty that has preceded her, Laura J Martin appears like a whole other dimension of amazing. Sometimes, cooped up in the box bedroom I laughably call an office, staring endlessly at a computer screen that will never give me enough love, I feel like one of those sightless, albino fish that lives in a cave in Mexico, or Mozambique. Sometimes, not all the time. I'm not sure anyone - not even Elton John in his coked up, peacocked to the gills prime - ever feels that life is one long, glittering party, with themselves as the epicentre.

Suffice to say, quite a few of my days - like yours - are humdrum. Hearing - seeing - Laura J Martin is like having a Mardi Gras of aceness explode in my head. She seems to have been blessed with a whole philharmonic orchestra's worth of musical talent: piano, mandolin, flute, ring-a-roses rhythms.

That she can pirouette all of these sounds out with such grace and transcendence is a rare gift indeed. All of us who saw her had never seen anything like this before. Even those of us who had seen her before. She's that unique in her talents, I'm convinced as I write this the following morning, that I must have dreamt part of her up.

And like all the best fairy tales, there's something sinister lurking behind these songs, something Laura herself doesn't seem to be in control of. That she skips in front of the monsters chasing her, flute in hand, defying them with little hand dances like spells, just makes the whole thing that much more enchanting. She's the kid in Spirited Away grown up. Little Red Riding Hood with a brandy in her hand.

She has pedals at her feet that make sounds appear that put smiles on our faces. She sings about Japanese arsonists as if they had scales and smoke coming from their snouts. Her flute sounds like a flock of macaws flying through an emerald canopy. She's like early Angela Carter in aural incarnation.

Yep, I'm smitten, and I'm not the only one, thank the dear Lord who I'm almost starting to believe in.

You should have been there, not simply to soothe my anxieties; you should have been there to chase away your own.

Addendum: In a different life, I put Coldplay on in this venue (Telford's Warehouse). While a select handful of humanity are swept up in Laura J Martin's musical vision, Pantymwyn's Jonny Buckland is collecting Coldplay's award for Best British Band at the Brits. That's a notable achievement for a man who went to the Alun School in Mold. Congratulations Jonny. We're proud of you.

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Super Furry Animals, Bryn Terfel and Only Men Aloud have been confirmed as the acts performing at Gary Speed's memorial match.

Welsh folk popper and Super Furry Animal Gruff Rhys is to be one of the stars of a multi-venue bash to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the launch of digital radio station BBC 6 Music.

Crackling Vinyl began as an excuse to play some old records to some new people, somewhere with a bar and good beer. I wanted a musical refuge from all the weekend boozehounds demanding 'The Roses'. Then someone mentioned it might be an idea to get a couple of bands playing, artists sympatico with whatever mood I wanted to create. And that's how I became a 'promoter'.

It's what explains the hundreds of crows that must have visited the corners of my eyes over the last couple of months, inexplicably leaving their splayed feet behind; it's why I have hollow, yellow eyes, and it's why almost every conversation I've had since October has ended with an unsubtle variation of the following: "please come to my next night! Otherwise I'm paying for the bands out of my own pocket and Ava will have to go clean chimneys..."

Little focuses the mind more than the knowledge that your saggy backside, and saggier bank account, are on the line if people don't turn up.

I have become something of a wizard at half-baked poster designs in Photoshop. I've spent hours chopping A4 coloured card up - illicit photocopies from the work Canon - in an effort to circumnavigate the £50 a German company reasonably charges for 1,000 flyers. In fact, I don't think of £50 as £50 any more. £50 is 10 people. And a guestlist is a friendship haemorrhage.

So it was I arrived at my local venue last week, filled with nerves like hopping shrapnel. Unlike many promoters, I hadn't had to negotiate the considerable obstacles of finding a PA (sound system) or engineer (Olympic standard bum crack displayer with chip addiction). Neither did I have to find a decent venue: Telfords Warehouse is where I DJ every Friday night. If I played my records loudly enough, they'd drown out all the weekend echoes of frustrated demands for "Bombay Bicycle Club... or... hey, how about some Rihanna? Eh?"

It's ironic that I started DJing in Telford's because I stuck a couple of bands in there back in the day (Grand Drive in... erm... 1998). Coldplay and Mclusky soon after that. But not on the same bill, more's the pity.

The first feeling when I arrive is one of guilty relief. Despite my being 15 minutes late, the bands haven't arrived. Perhaps this means they've decided to give it a miss! I can go home and hide under a duvet with cake! I can fabricate a lie about the lines of disgruntled people who turned up to see them, when - in reality - my spam and Blue Peter flyers only lure in seven confused stragglers.

This thought could have some considerable time to tease my brain. Whichever clock it is bands work by, it isn't the one that you or I use. It's generally one to four hours later than our clock, and appears to run on ulcers. Mine.

Bands also have a rare ability to blow tyres; find traffic jams; mishear Chester as Cirencester; and lose a relatively important piece of equipment along the way, like the drummer.

A band's satnav (if they have one ) is programmed to call in at every service station it passes for Amber Leaf, Ginsters pasties and a toilet trip that has to take no shorter than 43 minutes, after one of the rhythm section falls into a marijuana snooze on the toilet.

I may be being somewhat liberal with the 'facts' here. These are all the thoughts that pass through my traumatised mind as I wait less than four minutes for Y Niwl to arrive. They load in with minimal fuss. Y Niwl are, after all, consummate professionals and used to the drill. I remember one very new band arriving at this same venue, then sitting around smoking fags and drinking their rider, waiting for someone to come and unpack their equipment for them. I mean, how dare we? I mean, they?

I have messages that artist number two, Sam Airey, is on his way. He's "somewhere outside Manchester". I try to ignore the fact that that could mean anywhere from Caracas to Cleethorpes and try to figure out - for the 23rd time since I woke up - how to get my 'smart' phone to bulk text message everyone in my contact list. Twice.

Come tonight. I beg you. Or our marriage/friendship/professional relationship is OVER. (It'll still cost you £6).

Then I get the good news about the advance ticket sales. I need 80 people to cover the artists and DJs - but the figures are presented in currency.

"You've done about £180 online..."

This doesn't seem like a lot. I wonder if they'll give me the £180 in cash and how valid my passport is.

"Now all we have to do is deduct the VAT..."

"The what?"

"Value Added Tax - 17.5%..."

"Value added for whom, exactly?"

A fingerful of money is handed over. It may as well be in Drachma. My stomach attempts a world speed dive record but then smashes its stomach-y face into the cold, stony reality at my feet: I am up Fecal Gorge sans pedalo.

In Telfords, it transpires, even people in the restaurant upstairs can hear you scream.

Comedy bouncers and even more hilarious environmental scientists make pithy observations about my constant pacing, gnawing of nails, general look of the condemned, whilst all around me people begin to turn up. But it would have been nice if it hadn't been the entire guestlist en masse first.

My mum and dad arrive. I charge them. Yes, I know. I KNOW...

The next three hours evaporate in a haze of relief. But the stress levels have yanked me up so high, I don't really get a chance to enjoy any of what I've 'worked' so 'hard' to put on for people.

Atlas Twins (a very late addition to the bill) are a little Trwbador, in that there is a boy playing a Spanish guitar rather wonderfully; and a girl singing with a voice that'd melt a glacier, then re-freeze it into some awe-inducing palace of crystals. They're ace. But the details are all up there in the ether, I'm sorry to say.

The Crackling Vinyl DJs are playing great records. You could threaten me with a week of solitary confinement in a sound capsule of eternal JLS and still I wouldn't remember a single record that they played.

I fare a little better with Sam Airey. Firstly, he looks so relaxed it somewhat dissipates my adrenaline. However I do remember, with the clarity I normally reserve for childbirths and winning goals in European Cup finals, the captivating sadness and wonder of Sam's last song - and forthcoming single - The Unlocking. Some voices can reach round your heart with effortless grace. Sam pickpockets your heart, and leaves you feeling content with the crime.

Comedy bouncer man (or Paul, as he's more commonly known) has to come drag me away because I've forgotten to put a couple of competition winners' names on the guestlist (ulcer #4 of the evening). Some fat prat is introducing Y Niwl up on stage. I've gone all out of body by this stage. Why is he/am I wearing a flat cap?

Y Niwl are as perfect as primary colours. We don't chase red around the room bemoaning that it should get with the times, maybe add a dubstep tic for modernity's sake. We don't sit green in a chair and explain that it's carriage clock time because it hasn't made the effort to keep abreast of developments. Yellow doesn't receive a letter through the post threatening it with fines if it doesn't get its hair cut just-so, to complement the ironic 80s specs.

Mind you, yellow is still traumatised after what Coldplay did to it. It'd get special dispensation regardless.

I don't know anything about blue. As a Liverpool fan, it doesn't exist. You may as well try and force a dog to write poetry.

Y Niwl are perfect. And getting better. What they do with the primary colours, almost self-limited as they are, is focus on melody, rhythm, energy... and I shall treat them with a similarly minimal respect.

Just ace.

I've spent the ensuing week humming nothing but their tunes. If they could stick them in tiny clothes, make them bump and grind in front of an inappropriate audience, and jam on some future bass, these tracks would be MASSIVE. Thank god they haven't and they won't.

Y Niwl finish and I play some records for people. Four, I think, and two of them were rubbish.

A lad approaches the DJ booth:

"Hey mate..." he says.

"Yes?"

"Have you got any Roses?"

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