As you may have already seen – particularly if you follow me on Twitter, where my blathering about it is particularly intense – the big news around here is that I am playing this year’s Indietracks festival in a month’s time. Eeeeeeeeeee! My slot is yet to be confirmed but it is likely that I’ll be playing proper acoustic on the train. Eeeeeeeeee again!

Me and Indietracks go back a long way. I played solo at the first one in 2007 (see the photo above), with The Pete Green Corporate Juggernaut in 2009, and then with The Sweet Nothings in 2011. I’ve been to all the other ones as well. It is kind of the best thing ever in the history of the world.

I’ve also been asked to play one of the gigs taking place in the run-up to the festival (I don’t like the term ‘warm-up’, which wrongly implies insufficiency, but that’s a conversation for another time). This is proper exciting too – it’s with the wonderful Haiku Salut and the charming Sunbathers. And it’s in Leicester, which means I get to go to the equally wonderful and charming Mirch Masala for my tea.

Dates and things – well, dates – can be found on the gigs page, where I shall also post the time and stage for my Indietracks slot when those become certain.

One of the many lovely things about playing Indietracks is featuring on the festival’s annual compilation album. This year’s has just been released on Bandcamp: pay £2 (or more if you feel generous) and you can download a staggering 47 tracks of indiepop goodness. I listened to the first half of it last night and it is a thing truly laden with such manifold wonders that I ended up going way past my bedtime.

It’s also your first chance to hear a track from my new album The Glass Delusion! I’ll take some copies along to Indietracks to sell to you, but if you can’t wait another month for a taster of the unique new sparklegloom sub-genre I am pioneering, that’s just one more reason to download the Indietracks 2013 compilation album and wrap yer lugholes round track 35, ‘Pilot Light’. Track 36 is Helen Love so that’ll cheer you up again afterwards.

As, indeed, should the news that I am celebrating my appearance at Indietracks by making my first solo single Everything I Do is Gonna be Sparkly available as a free download! (I’ll celebrate it in other ways too, like going to the pub and saying “eeeeeeeee!” a lot, so please don’t think I’m strange.) So if you don’t already own the luscious vinyl version released by Atomic Beat Records back in 2007, fill yer boots.

That’s it for now – more about the album (and, undoubtedly, Indietracks) soon!