arab strap's elephant shoe / tracey thorn's another planet

Why did no one ever tell me how much I would like Arab Strap, a band whose third album Elephant Shoe sounds to me like proportions of American Analog Set, American Music Club (I can't help it if those two groups have similar names, I'd say Mark Eitzel but you'd know I was just trying to get out of saying 'American Music Club') and, er um already forgotten (I'll come back and fill in the other bits next time I listen to it). Anyway back to my core complaint - why didn't anyone ever tell me how much I would like this band, and why, when I bought this CD probably over a decade ago, didn't somebody call me up or put a note in the letterbox saying 'now you've bought that Arab Strap album for 50c or something, why don't you actually play it because you'll really like it! WHY.

Also, I'm about half way through Tracey Thorn's memoir of suburbia, which is really good so far and a tad more self-aware than Lol Tolhurst's Crawley meanderings. Thorn grew up in Brookmans Park, an apparently nothing place which she describes as having status of a private new town and/or garden city (well, all garden cities were 'private' i.e. funded by individual investors and new towns did not come into being until 1946, twenty years after the establishment of Brookmans Park, but look... the wikipedia entry on the place does not even cover any of its creation history apart from the original buildings/families which were present in the area before the 20th century, so hats off to TT for uncovering anything). (I guess that wikipedia page is another for my 'dumb things I gotta do' list). 

Meanwhile, pretty decent book. I am enjoying it anyway. TT is three years older than me but watched all the same crap on TV I used to watch, particularly when we lived in Britain 1974-75, so I guess one of us was super advanced or one of us was a little bit of a giant baby, not sure. I'll come back to this when I've finished reading it.*

*If I don't, I'm really, really sorry. Also, the book is not this blurry - unless I look at it without my glasses on.