It's refreshing and reassuring to know that, even this late on in the history of popular music (if it can universally be defined such) things can still emerge which knock the listener for six. For all the scientific arguments about us "running out of possible tunes", there are people operating out there who still have the capacity to slap one around the chops violently with their work. Sometimes we'll run away from the stereo arguing that it's "just a noise" or something similar, but occasionally it will hit a nerve.

So it happened with me when I saw Dufus live on their first UK tour back in 2003. On first appearances, things didn't look too promising. They all looked uncannily like people I once shared a commune with in the late nineties, and those folk only managed to produce sub-Aphex Twin styled electronic doodles whilst I lived with them. Aurally, however, Dufus were something else.

Follow the link to the YouTube video below and you'll hear a sample of their work for yourself. Whilst I won't dispute that it is perhaps possible to hear the traces of certain influences within the song - a bit of The Residents maybe, some tinges of the Beach Boys, pieces of hardcore, some of the more ga-ga pieces of acapella avant garde experimentalism - it's very very hard to see the joins. The cocktail of different genres and ideas meshes to create an unearthly whole. As such, I've always thought that Dufus would be a band that most journalists would dread. It's nigh on impossible to describe something that sounds genuinely unlike any piece of work you've heard before. You just have to urge people to listen, and hope they'll appreciate something that does admittedly sound rather odd.

When I first saw the band live on their first UK tour in 2003, I felt an overpowering urge to quit my day-job, drop everything I was doing, and form a band that were exactly like this. Common sense prevailed in the end, obviously, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of the UK anti-folkers came into being as a result of those gigs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr6SnbhXkSo

Another band who were influential in causing other people to get involved with music in the mid-eighties - though this is the only link, and I'll admit it's a tenuous one - were The Pastels. The vast majority of the output within the C86 movement (if it could accurately be described as such) is derided by mainstream music critics now, and to a certain extent The Pastels have been on the receiving end of that. Whilst as a band they were sometimes less than perfect, there are numerous gems within their back catalogue that totally make up for it, not least "Crawl Babies", a single I mentioned briefly in my recent Syd Barrett entry. A downbeat, child-like and scuffed up little tune, it sounds reminiscent of the best of the uncommercial end of British sixties music, not least Syd Barrett and obscure psych peddlers Apple (I'd be willing to bet the latter lot weren't an influence, though, but check out "Buffalo Billy Can" if you can be bothered). For all that, or perhaps because of that, it's one of my favourite singles of the eighties.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shnXuSP8pPs

Hope you enjoy them, or at least find them interesting.