This month the band are the cover stars of The Wire magazine – that extraordinarily resilient and outré music publication which, at the time of writing is still readily available in WHSmiths – if you go past the overpriced confectionery, magazines are now relegated to the back of the shop – there I see Still House Plants on a shelf, in a Railway Station branch of WHSmiths – looking very cool but strangely out of time and very much of it.

Cut to the White Hotel, in darkest Salford – I guess the closest the North West gets to a venue like London’s Cafe Oto – where in between decadent all-nighters that start at midnight, they do put on lots of artists such as you might read about in The Wire at more sociable hours. There are 3 musicians gathering on the stage and as they start to play I’m immediately struck by telepathic interplay between them. This is very much a group. One brilliantly innovative, minimalist guitarist (cut from the same cloth as Wire’s Bruce Gilbert, John McGeoch or David Pajo perhaps), a fantastic freewheeling drummer who has a very stripped-down kit -(Robert Wyatt or Wire’s Robert Gotobed springs to mind -yeah that good) -and a singer who spends the set hunched over a mic stand facing the band but has this remarkable, husky soulful voice that rises up from nowhere and adds an unexpected emotional heft that absolutely lifts this music into somewhere stratospheric.  

The songs aren’t conventionally structured and they veer between danceable beats and sounding like the drums are falling down stairs but it never gets tedious or overly chin-stroking – this is deeply experimental music you can dance to, or just stand back and take it all in.

It’s an exhilarating, and hugely energising experience watching them lock in and out of each other doing their thing. It turns out I haven’t seen it all before, there is still music out that there can surprise and delight that is completely otherworldly.  I pick up a beautifully packaged CD, make my feelings known to the disarmingly charming musicians at the merch stand and walk back into the darkness of Salford. Still House Plants moved me. Let them move you.